S. BUSINESS 

U^ Sermons for Children 



C.E.JEFFERSON 











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MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 



BOOKS BY DR. JEFFERSON 



The Character of Jesus 

Doctrine and Deed 

The Minister as Prophet 

The New Crusade 

Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers 

Quiet Talks with Earnest People 

Things Fundamental 

My Father's Business 



Christmas Builders 

Faith and Life 

The Old Year and the New 

The World's Christmas Tree 



THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

New York 



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MY FATHER'S 
BUSINESS 

A SERIES OF SERMONS TO CHILDREN 

BY 

CHARLES EDWARD JEFFERSON 

Pastor of Broadway Tabernacle^ New York 




NEW YORK 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 






Copyright, 1909 
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 



Published^ Septembevy IQOg 



SEP 11 


662 
1909 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Christ and the Children .... Frontispiece 
From the drawing by Plockhorst 

PAGE 

Christ as a Child 24 

From the drawing by Jef Leempoels 

Christ and the Doctors 48 

From the drawing by H. Hofmann 

" And He was Subject unto Them "... 74 

From the drawing by H. Hofmann 

The Boy Samuel 100 

. From the drawing by Sir Joshua Reynolds 

The Good Shepherd 120 

From the drawing by F. J. Shields 
Christ the Carpenter . . . ... . . 148 

From the drawing by Holman Hunt 
Christ Preaching to the People . . . . 178 

From the drawing by H. Hofm.ann 

Christ Washing Peter's Feet 212 

From the drawing by Ford Madox Brown 

The Ascension ....'. ^ .. . 240 

From the drawing by E. von Liphart 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Line upon Line :. i 

IL How TO Grow 23 

IIL The Duty of Asking Questions . 47 

IV. The Beauty of Obedience ... 73 

V. My Father's Business . .. . , 99 

VL The Silent Years . . . :. . 119 

VIL Work . ......:. ..; 147 

VIIL The Will ..... . ... . 177 

IX. Honesty . .. . . :. , ;,: :,; 211 

X. Being a Christian .: . . .. .. 239 



LINE UPON LINE 

** For it is precept upon precept, pre- 
cept upon precept; line upon line, 
line upon line; here a little, and there 
a little." Isaiah 28: 10. 

Preached Sunday Morning 
May 13, 1900 



LINE UPON LINE 

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THE Old Testament was written, as 
you know, in Hebrew, and in order 
that you may know what the lan- 
guage of the Old Testament is like I want 
to give you a quotation from the Hebrew: 
'^ Tsav la tsav^ tsav la tsav; qav la qav, qav 
la qav; z'eir sham, z'eir sham/' As some 
of you may not be able to remember these 
unusual words, allow me to give it to you 
now in English: *^ Precept upon precept, 
precept upon precept; line upon line, line 
upon line; here a little, and there a little." 
You will find the words recorded in the 
loth verse of the 28th chapter of Isaiah. 
Most of you, I suppose, have never read 
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LINE UPON LINE 

this chapter in Isaiah, and if any of you 
have read it, I suspect you have not made 
much out of it. And that is not at all sur- 
prising, for often big folks when they read 
this chapter do not have an altogether easy 
time. I want, therefore, to pinch a piece of 
it off and shoot light through it, that you 
may see what an interesting chapter it 
really is. 

In order to understand Isaiah you must 
use your imagination. The imagination is 
the power of the mind which sees things in 
pictures. Boys and girls are rich in imagi- 
nation. In that respect they are like the 
prophets. No one can understand a 
prophet unless he has an imagination and 
uses it. 

The first thing you must see is the City of 

Samaria. There it is on the summit of a 

hill. The hill is the shape of an egg. The 

slopes of the hill are covered with vine- 

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LINE UPON LINE 

yards. All around the hill there are lovely 
valleys, and the sides of these valleys are 
clothed with olive trees. Do you see the 
city with its towers green with ivy, with its 
gardens of bloom, and with its hillsides 
beautiful with vines and olive trees? If 
you see that, you see what Isaiah saw. 

Samaria is a wicked city. Many of its 
men and women are bad. They live in 
laziness and sin. They spend much of their 
time in eating big dinners. And at these 
dinners they drink wine^ many of them 
drinking until they are drunk. Leading 
men of Samaria have a fashion of putting 
an enemy into their mouth which steals 
away their brains. There they are, lying 
half drunk on their cushions while their na- 
tion is rushing on to ruin. If you see that 
you see what Isaiah saw. 

We are now ready for the first verse in 
the chapter. "Woe unto you, drunkards! 
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LINE UPON LINE 

Your beauty is a fading flower. God's 
storm is coming from the north, and you 
will be overwhelmed." In order to startle 
these men and make them realize what a 
dreadful fate is hanging over them, the 
prophet paints four striking pictures. He 
says, " Woe unto you drunkards, the enemy 
from the north will beat you down like a 
hail storm. You will be swept away as with 
a flood. You will be trampled into the dust 
under victorious feet. You will be like a 
fig ripe in the month of June, fully two 
months before the time for figs, and just 
as a man when he finds a June fig is so de- 
lighted with a delicacy so rare, that no 
sooner does he get it into his hand than he 
puts it into his mouth; so the moment the 
enemy from the north gets you into his 
clutches he will swallow you!" All this 
fills up the first seven verses of this wonder- 
ful chapter. 

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LINE UPON LINE 

Then the prophet turns to Jerusalem. 
He looks at the politicians and leaders and 
merchants and even the preachers, and sees 
that they, like the lords and ladies in 
Samaria, are lazy and selfish and drunken. 
With sadness he says, " These my country- 
men reel and stagger. They cannot see 
straight or think straight. Their eyes totter, 
their mind wabbles." 

While Isaiah pours forth his warnings, 
his countrymen say to one another with 
mocking sarcasm: "Whom is this man 
talking to? Does he take us for babies? 
Does he suppose that we have just been 
weaned? Why does he feed us on such 
nursery stuff? " Then they begin to mimic 
him. They think he is monotonous, and 
that his language is babyish, and so they 
ape his tones and language after this fash- 
ion : " Tsav la tsav, tsav la tsav ; qav la qav, 
qav la qav." Can't you imagine you hear 
[7] 



LINE UPON LINE 
them? — that little toper with the high shrill 
voice saying: "Tsav la tsav, tsav la tsav"? 
— that bloated sot saying, with drunken ac- 
cent: " Qav la qav, qav la qav "? — that old 
wine bibber, with his deep bass voice, say- 
ing in taunting tones : " Z'eir sham, z'eir 
sham"? 

The prophet listens to their mimicry, and 
is not silenced by it. Turning on them he 
says : " God will speak to you monoto- 
nously in another way by and by. This 
enemy from the north will say to you: 
" Tsav la tsav, tsav la tsav; qav la qav, qav la 
qav; z'eir sham, z'eir sham." And he will 
say it in a way from which there shall be 
no escape. When the time comes for God 
to speak to you, you will find a monotony in 
woe, and because of your sins you will be 
captured and broken and ruined. That is 
the meaning of the chapter down through 
verse 13. 

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LINE UPON LINE 
I have taken my text from this chapter 
this morning, because boys and girls some- 
times talk and act very much like the drunk- 
ards in Jerusalem. Strange to say, boys and 
girls sometimes get tipsy. I do not mean 
that they drink wine or gin or whiskey, but 
there are other things besides spirituous 
liquors that cause intoxication. Any poison 
which upsets the mind makes one drunk. 
The soul is a palace. At the center of the 
palace there is a throne. On the throne 
there is a king. And the name of that king 
is reason. If any poison breaks into the 
palace and topples reason from its throne, 
the soul immediately reels and staggers like 
a drunken man. For instance, it is possible 
to be drunk with anger. A person may be 
so angry that he cannot see straight or think 
straight or talk straight. In a fit of anger 
one does not always know just what he is 
doing. In a spasm of anger-drunkenness a 
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LINE UPON LINE 

boy or girl or man or woman may do those 
things for which afterward he is heartily 
ashamed. 

Hate is another poison which makes the 
soul drunk. When we hate a person we be- 
come as blear-eyed as a toper. We cannot 
see clearly, and make all sorts of false and 
foolish statements. A person may get 
drunk on pride. He may become puffed 
up, and go swaggering through the town 
with all the silly bluster of a drunkard. 
Self-conceit also has made many a person 
drunk. A self-conceited man may hold his 
head so high as to cause his brain to grow 
dizzy, so that he cannot recognize old ac- 
quaintances when he meets them on the 
street. 

In all these various ways it is possible for 
even boys and girls to lose their heads. But 
one of the worst poisons which you can ever 
take into your heart and mind is the poison 

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LINE UPON LINE 
of disobedience. Sometimes when parents 
speak to their children about things which 
they ought to do, or ought not to do, the 
children get off by themselves and say, " Do 
they take us for babies, do they think we 
don't know anything?'' Whenever a boy 
or girl says that, he is acting precisely as the 
topers of Jerusalem did. Sometimes boys 
rebel against their mother, and scold be- 
cause they are spoken to so many times. 
They say, " Why, mother, you have told me 
that twenty times. Do not tell it to me 
any more. You are always harping on the 
same old string. Why don't you tell me 
something new?" And occasionally if a 
boy is very drunk he will even go so far as 
to mimic his parents. He will say behind 
their backs : " Tsav la tsav, tsav la tsav ; qav 
la qav, qav la qav; z'eir sham, z'eir sham." 
Of course he does not speak in Hebrew. 
He speaks in English. The words of the 
[II] 



LINE UPON LINE 

Hebrew drunkards when translated into 
New York English mean simply this: 
" Bah, bah, bah, bah, go away!" 

Why is it that your parents tell you the 
same thing so many times? It is because 
they are ordained servants of the Lord. 
Your father is a prophet, and your mother 
is a prophetess, and their chief business in 
the world is to teach to you the law of God. 
In the Book of Deuteronomy we are told 
that God instructed Moses to tell all the 
fathers and mothers among the Hebrews to 
teach his laws diligently unto their chil- 
dren, and to talk of them when they sat 
down in the house, and when they walked 
by the way, and when they lay down, and 
when they got up. Fathers and mothers 
were commanded to bind God's laws upon 
their hands, and to stamp them across their 
foreheads, and to write them upon the posts 
of their houses and upon their gates. 

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LINE UPON LINE 

Parents were thus commanded to keep 
God's law before the eyes of their children 
all the time. If fathers and mothers do not 
do this, they are committing the greatest sin 
which it is possible for parents to be guilty 
of. They tell you the same things over and 
over again because God has commanded 
them to do it. 

Moreover, it is necessary for them to say 
the same things many times in order to get 
these things into your mind and heart. It 
takes a deal of repetition to get a big idea 
into a small boy's soul. Did you ever see a 
pile driver driving piles? The pile driver 
shoots up into the air a great mass of iron, 
and without a moment's warning lets it 
drop upon the head of the pile. The pile 
does not mind the first blow very much, and 
stands almost as proud and tall as ever. 
But the pile driver keeps right on at its 
work. It lifts the iron into the air and 
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LINE UPON LINE 

lets it drop five times, ten times, fifty times, 
perhaps a hundred times, and by and by 
the pile is driven down deep into the river 
bed, and is so firm and safe that men are 
not afraid to make it part of the foundation 
of a house. Fathers and mothers must drive 
principles into their children's hearts be- 
cause these principles are the piles upon 
w^hich the house of character must be 
erected. If the piles are not deep and solid 
the house in later years will come tumbling 
down. It is for your eternal good that pre- 
cept is placed upon precept, and line is 
placed upon line. 

^ A man who cuts a sentence upon a block 
of marble spends many hours in doing it. 
He taps his chisel with his mallet time after 
time, holding the chisel point, so it seems, 
in almost precisely the same place, and for 
good reason. No one can chisel words 
beautifully with a single blow. The more 
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LINE UPON LINE 

beautifully the work is done the larger must 
be the number of strokes, and the longer 
must be the time expended. Not only does 
the marble cutter want to make the words 
beautiful, but he wants to cut them so that 
the storms of winter will not rub them out. 
He must cut these words so deep that they 
will last long after the marble cutter is in 
his grave. Fathers and mothers must cut 
upon their children's hearts the words of 
God's eternal law. It is the most beautiful 
work which anyone can do, and it cannot 
be accomplished without much patience and 
long continued labor. The heart is harder 
than any marble, and in order that words 
may last after the human body has been 
worn out and cast away, it is necessary for 
fathers and mothers in the training of their 
children to hit the heart repeatedly day 
after day, week after week, month after 
month, through many a year. In this way 
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LINE UPON LINE 

they are able to do work which will outlast 
the stars. 

When a stone mason wants to break a 
large stone in two, he lifts up his sledge 
hammer and strikes the stone. The stone 
in many instances pays no attention to the 
blow, but lies sullen and stubborn, looking 
at the mason in a way which says, "You 
can't break me!" The mason strikes the 
stone again, and still the stone remains un- 
broken. He strikes it three times, four 
times, but not until the hammer descends 
for the ninth time does the stone submit and 
break in two. Which of the nine blows 
broke the stone? Certainly not the first or 
the second or the third, nor was it the sev- 
enth or the eighth or the ninth. It was all 
the nine blows combined which accom- 
plished the work. 

Bad habits like stones are broken by re- 
peated blows. Every one of you has a bad 
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LINE UPON LINE 
habit. If you do not know what your bad 
habit is, ask your mother and she will tell 
you. These bad habits must be broken. 
The only way to break them is to strike 
them again and again and again. You must 
strike them and you must strike them hard, 
and in this work your parents must assist 
you. The only reason that they keep strik- 
ing your bad habits is because they wish to 
set you free. 

Your father and mother do not tell you 
many different things because there are not 
many different things to tell. There are 
only a few letters in the alphabet. And 
after you have learned them all there are no 
more letters to be learned. When once you 
have mastered the twenty-six letters, you can 
read the largest English book ever pub- 
lished. Even in the Bible there are only 
twenty-six letters. There are only a few 
kinds of figures, — just as many as you have 
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LINE UPON LINE 

fingers on both your hands. After you have 
learned these ten there are no more to learn. 
You cannot find in any arithmetic a figure 
different from those ten which you learned 
when you first went to school. There are 
only a few tones in music. Even the finest 
voice cannot produce many tones. After 
one has mastered these few tones he can sing 
any song that was ever written. There are 
only a few laws of life, but these few laws 
are all important. If you learn these laws 
and learn them thoroughly, your life will be 
blessed all your days. Your parents harp 
on a few strings because out of these few 
strings all the music of your life is going 
to come. 

It was not pleasant for Isaiah to warn the 
drunkards in Jerusalem when he knew that 
the drunkards did not care to listen to what 
he said. But Isaiah knew that it was his 
duty to warn these men because he saw 
[i8] 



LINE UPON LINE 
things which were hidden from their eyes. 
To see anyone in danger and not give that 
person a word of warning is a fearful sin. 
Boys and girls are in great danger, and that 
is why fathers and mothers must speak so 
many times. Young people cannot see very 
far. A boy at five cannot see five years 
ahead of him. A boy at fifteen cannot see 
his twentieth birthday. No one of us can 
see one step beyond the point in life up to 
which we have lived, unless we use the 
knowledge which has been gained by those 
who have lived beyond us. No one knows 
the enemies that lurk in ambush by the way 
except those who have traveled along that 
road. Fathers and mothers have traveled 
long distances through life, and they know 
a thousand things which their children can- 
not know. It is because they see the pitfalls 
and the temptations and the awful dangers, 
that they keep saying to you : " Do this, 
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LINE UPON LINE 
and don't do that." They do not want you 
to be captured and broken and ruined. 

The teaching of your parents may seem 
to be monotonous, but it is not so monoto- 
nous as the teaching which you will receive 
by and by if you do not heed your parents' 
words. If you do not like the monotony of 
advice you will like still less the monotony 
of punishment. In youth you are offered 
the "Tsav la tsav, tsav la tsav; qav la qav, 
qav la qav;" from the best friends which 
you will ever have, your father and mother. 
But if you do not receive what they try to 
give you, then, later on, your enemy will 
speak to you a " Tsav la tsav, tsav la tsav; " 
which will make you wince and groan. For 
if you do not obey God's laws, if you are 
not good children of your Heavenly Father, 
your accusing conscience will some day cry 
out in a terrible monotone: "Tsav la tsav, 
tsav la tsav." You will have pain upon 
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LINE UPON LINE 

pain, loss upon loss, woe upon woe, and will 
fall at last into the very ruin from which 
your parents tried to save you. Listen, then, 
to the exhortation of St. Paul : " Children, 
obey your parents in the Lord, for this is 
right." " Honor your father and mother, 
that it may be well with you, and that you 
may live long on the earth." 



[21] 



ir 

HOW TO GROW 

"And the child grew." Luke 2: 40. 

Preached Sunday Morning 

May 12, i<)Oi 



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HOW TO GROW 

THAT is the first thing which the 
New Testament says Jesus ever did. 
It is the only thing which the New 
Testament says Jesus did in the first twelve 
years of his life. Across the pages of twelve 
great years St. Luke writes that simple sen- 
tence, " And the child grew." At the age 
of twelve Jesus comes before us and speaks. 
He speaks but once and then like a meteor 
disappears. We do not see or hear Him 
for eighteen long years. Across these years 
of silence St. Luke writes the words, " He 
increased in wisdom and in stature," that 
is, ^' He kept right on growing." The 
chief fact, then, in the life of Jesus up to 
his thirtieth birthday is the fact that He 
grew. Since the New Testament has writ- 

[25] 



HOW TO GROW 

ten that fact so large and has made it stand 
out all alone so that we should be sure to 
see it, we ought to ask what it means and 
find out what it teaches. 

For what Jesus did we must do. To be 
a Christian is to be a follower of Him. 
He is the ideal man, and what He did all 
men must do. He is the ideal child and 
what He did all children ought to do. If 
we are to follow Him, we ought to begin in 
childhood, and the starting point of all dis- 
cipleship is stated in these four short words : 
N< " And the child grew." 

That was the chief thing which the boy 
Jesus did. If He had not grown He could 
not have done later on His mighty deeds, 
nor spoken His wonderful words. He 
grew so fast that when He went to Jeru- 
salem, at the age of twelve, the big learned 
city doctors wondered at Him, and by the 
time He was thirty He had grown so far 
[26] 



HOW TO GROW 

beyond all the other boys of His town that 
men and women looked at Him in amaze- 
ment, not knowing what to think or say. 
In those thirty years He had grown to be so 
strong and brave and wise and good that He 
still overtops all the men who have ever 
lived, and when anybody says, " Behold the 
man ! " we look up and see no man, but Jesus 
only. We should have no New Testament, 
no Christian hymns, no Christian church, if 
Jesus had not grown. 

^ The chief thing for every boy and girl to 
do is to grow. The world does not want 
boys and girls to work. Grown folks can do 
the work. Houses must be built, and fur- 
niture manufactured, and streets paved, and 
cars run, and business carried on, but we do 
not want boys to do these things. Boys have 
nothing to do but grow. Dresses must be 
made, and dinners cooked, and scrubbing 
done, but we do not want girls to do it. 
[27] 



HOW TO GROW 

Girls have nothing to do but grow. The 
world is very particular on this point. It 
says : " Now do not disturb those children. 
They are busy with their growing. Do not 
ask them to do any work, for they must 
have a chance to grow!" And so the men 
and women do all the work. They work 
to get money to buy bread and meat, and 
hats and clothes and boots, and books and 
toys. They keep the boys and girls supplied 
with everything they need, and they do all 
this that every boy and girl may grow. 

Now, children must grow all over. Every 
human being is made up of two pieces. 
One piece you can see, that is the body; the 
other piece you cannot see, that is the mind. 
You can see a boy's eyes, but not his mem- 
ory. You can see his ears, but not his 
imagination. You can see his nose, but not 
his will. Eyes and ears are organs of the 
body, memory and will are organs of the 
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HOW TO GROW 

mind, and all alike must grow. A child 
must grow both in body and in mind to 
make a complete man. 

That is the way Jesus grew. St. Luke 
says: "He increased in wisdom and in 
stature." Stature means standing, or height. 
Jesus' body grew taller and taller. Once, 
when they measured Him, He was only two 
feet tall, but He soon added another inch 
and then another, and another, and another. 
The women in Nazareth used to say to 
Mary, " How that boy of yours is grow- 
ing!" And I know that Mary felt very 
proud, for mothers are always glad to have 
their children grow. 

But the inward growth of Jesus was more 
wonderful than that of His body. His 
mind grew wider and deeper and higher. 
His disposition became sweeter and richer 
and gentler. His spirit waxed loftier and 
nobler and mightier, until He at last be- 
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HOW TO GROW 

came great enough to say, " Come unto Me 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest." He took this v^orld in 
His arms. I have often vs^ondered hov^ 
Mary felt when she saw her boy growing. 
How pleased and delighted she must have 
been to see His mind unfold, to watch His 
affections expand, to note new graces burst- 
ing into blossom. I think she must have 
been the happiest woman in all Galilee, for 
nothing makes a mother's heart so happy as 
to see her children grow; not simply in 
body, but in goodness and in all beautiful 
dispositions Jesus grew to be so true and 
wise and noble that Mary almost wor- 
shiped him. Before the world knew any- 
thing about Him she knew how wonderful 
He was. You can see what confidence she 
had in Him from what she said to some 
men at the marriage feast in Cana: "What- 
soever He saith unto you, do it." She never 
[30] 



HOW TO GROW 
would have said that had he not been a 
good boy. 

Now, a child may grow in one part of 
his nature and not grow in the other. Some- 
times children are born with a disease that 
will not let them grow. Their body reaches 
a certain point and then stops. The parents 
coax it with all kinds of food, and the doc- 
tors coddle it with all kinds of remedies, 
but not all the king's horses, nor all the 
king's men can tempt the little body to grow 
any more. It is a terrible disappointment 
for parents to have a child whose body will 
not grow. It makes them sad. When a 
mother says, " The baby is not growing. He 
has not grown a bit for a long time," she 
says it with great sorrow in her voice, for 
she knows that in all probability the baby 
is going to die. Children are made to grow, 
and if they do not grow they cannot live. 
Or if they do live they are not like other 
[31] 



HOW TO GROW 

people. They are known as dwarfs or 
pygmies. Poor little things, they are some- 
times carried over the country, along with 
chimpanzees and baboons and other queer 
creatures, so that people can see them. It 
is an awful misfortune to have a body which 
will not grow. If your body is growing 
you ought to be thankful every day you live, 
and tell God how glad you are He has given 
you a body which grows. The very best 
thing a body can do is to grow. 

But sometimes the body grows and the 
soul remains a dwarf. After the mind has 
reached a certain point it may refuse to 
grow and want to stay where it is. Big men 
and women sometimes have very small 
minds. They may be six feet tall and weigh 
ever so many pounds, and still have a little 
bit of a soul. Their aims may be low, and 
their ambitions little, and their sympathies 
narrow, and their affections stunted, and 
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HOW TO GROW 

their ideas puny. They are mental dwarfs. 
Everybody who comes near them knows 
they are small. Their conversation is thin, 
their dealings are petty. They are cross 
and crabbed, and unreasonable and ugly, 
and very hard to get along with. They are 
hard to live with because they are so small. 
We sometimes call such people childish, 
and I have heard them called big babies. 
A little baby a few months old is the sweet- 
est thing in all the world, but a big baby is 
one of the most terrible of all living crea- 
tures. We want to get away from that sort 
of baby as far as we can. Jesus' life was 
made miserable by big babies. There w^ere 
a lot of them in Nazareth. They had big 
bodies, but little minds. They wanted to 
kill Jesus simply because He had said some- 
thing they did not agree with. There were 
other babies in Capernaum. They would 
make a great fuss over an ox which had 
[33] 



HOW TO GROW 

fallen, but paid no attention to a fallen man. 
Jerusalem was filled with these babies. 
They dipped their fingers in water twenty 
times every day in order to show God how 
clean they were, but they never took the 
trouble to drive dirty thoughts out of their 
minds. What babies they were! I do not 
wonder that Jesus looked at them with as- 
tonishment and sorrow. 

It is an awful thing, boys and girls, to 
build up your body, and let your soul re- 
main a pigmy. What a tragedy! It is sui- 
cide. When the soul is created to grow into 
the image of God, what a pity to crush it 
down into a miserable little runt! And what 
a shame and disgrace it is, for if the mind 
does not grow it is nearly always a person's 
own fault. When the body will not grow, 
one cannot help it. Tom Thumb was not 
to blame because his body was so small. But 
when the soul remains a dwarf it is usually 
[34] 



HOW TO GROW 

because of sin. Shame on you if you do not 
grow! I would rather have a body only two 
feet high, with a mind inside my little skull 
capable of thinking great thoughts and ap- 
preciating noble people and lovely music 
and pictures, and dreaming beautiful 
dreams, than be as huge as Goliath, with a 
little mind in my big skull no larger than 
the mind of a cat! Jesus is King of Kings 
and Lord of Lords because He grew in 
wisdom as well as in stature. He grew both 
in body and in mind. 

Some one may ask, ^' How can I grow? " 
Let me find you an answer in the Sermon on 
the Mount. " Consider the lilies of the 
field, how they grow." How do they 
grow? By working, or worrying, or strug- 
gling? No ; simply by doing what God tells 
lilies to do. God wants lilies to keep them- 
selves partly in the earth and partly in the 
sun, and when they do that, they become 
[35] 



HOW TO GROW 

more beautiful than the most gorgeous of 
all Oriental kings. In other words, all that 
a lily has to do is to eat. It must eat both 
the earth and the sky. It must reach down 
into the dark earth for mica and feldspar 
and lime, and it must look up for the sun- 
beam and rain. By eating day by day the 
food which God has placed within its reach, 
it becomes a miracle of beauty and a joy 
to all the world. No wonder Jesus said, 
" Look at the lilies!" Lilies and children 
are alike in one thing. Their chief business 
is to grow, and in order to grow they must 
eat. 

Do you want to grow in body? Eat. 
Do not eat everything you fancy, or every- 
thing which boys and girls give you to eat, 
but eat what your father and mother know 
to be good. They know what your body 
needs. You do not know. God commands 
a lily to look to the earth and sun for its 
[36] 



HOW TO GROW 

food. God commands boys and girls to look 
to their parents for food. Suppose a lily 
should pout and say, "Old earth, you do 
not know what I need," and then toss its 
pretty head and say, " Old sun, I can get on 
without any help from you," what a foolish 
lily that would be. But there never was a 
foolish lily since the world was made. All 
the lilies have obeyed the command of God. 
They have looked constantly to the earth 
and sun, and God has given them a beauty 
whose praises have filled all the world. See 
how the lilies grow. They obey God, — do 
what God tells you to do. Look to your 
parents for your daily food and you will 
have a body more beautiful and wonderful 
than the body of a flower. If God so 
clothes the grass of the field which to-day 
is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall 
he not much more clothe you, O you pre- 
cious boys and girls? 

;[37] - . 



HOW TO GROW 

Be careful how and what you eat. Your 
body is the house in which your soul must 
do its work. If you do not build it strong, 
it will soon wear out and come tumbling 
down in ruin. When the house falls down 
the soul is obliged to leave. A soul cannot 
live on this earth outside of a body, so that 
if your body falls, your soul must travel to 
some other world, and you can never do 
here what God wanted you to do. Build 
your body out of the very best materials 
your parents can supply. 

But the mind, also, must have its food. 
The body eats out of the earth, the soul eats 
out of the sky. Your soul cannot possibly 
grow unless you feed it every day. That is 
the reason we send you to school. We want 
you to eat your lessons. Arithmetic and 
language and science are all foods for the 
mind. We buy you books in order that you 
may eat them. If you eat a bad book it 
[38] 



HOW TO GROW 

makes you scrawny and half sick, but if you 
eat a good book it will increase the muscles 
of your mind. The Bible is the best of all 
books. You ought to eat a piece of it every 
day. People that eat it regularly every day 
of their life increase in wisdom and in 
stature, and in favor with God and man. 
The chief reason why you ought to come to 
church is in order that you may eat. By 
eating the hymns and the prayers and the 
sermon you will grow into strong and capa- 
ble servants of God. You can never grow 
unless you eat. 

Jesus was fond of growing things. In 
His teaching He never spoke of stars and 
rocks, but He was always talking about 
grass and flowers, and grain and trees. I 
wonder if this is the explanation. Stars 
and rocks do not grow, but flowers and 
trees do. There was nothing more interest- 
ing to Jesus than a seed. I am sure He was 
[39] 



HOW TO GROW 

interested in a seed simply because it grows. 
I imagine one of the reasons He was so fond 
of children is that children grow. They re- 
minded him of the lilies of the field. He 
was very fond of them. His disciples tried 
to keep them away, but He said, " Let them 
come." The Pharisees tried to stop the 
singing of the children in the temple, but 
He said, " Let them sing." He took a child 
and set him in the midst of a company of 
grown folks one day and said : " Look, this 
child can teach you many lessons! " I am 
sure He did this because it is the nature of 
a child to grow. The only people in all 
Palestine who provoked Jesus beyond en- 
durance were the people who did not want 
to grow. These people thought they had 
grown enough. They had done enough. 
They knew enough. They were good 
enough. They had reached their growth, 
and there was nothing more to do but look 
[40] 



HOW TO GROW 

down with contempt upon their neighbors 
who had not grown so high as they had. 
Jesus could do nothing with such people. 
He cannot do anything with anybody who 
does not want to grow. 

Nor can He help anybody grow who will 
not eat. Growth depends almost entirely 
on eating. He was always talking to people 
about eating. One day He said to a great 
crowd of men: ''You must eat My flesh 
and drink My blood, or you can have no 
life in you." That was His way of saying, 
" You must eat My ideas, My feelings, My 
aims, My spirit, or you are not really alive. 
Unless you eat Me — build My life into 
your life — you cannot grow into what God 
wants all men to be." And on the last night 
which He ever spent upon our earth He 
came back to this old problem of eating. 
One of the last things He said to His dis- 
ciples was, '' Eat, eat My body. Drink, 
[41] 



HOW TO GROW 

drink My blood." Did you ever wonder 
why we have something which we call a 
"supper" on every Communion Sunday? 
Jesus told us to have this supper because He 
wants us to remind ourselves again and 
again that God demands nothing so much 
as He demands growth, and that it is im- 
possible for us to grow without eating. We 
must feed constantly on Him. 

Jesus learned this by His own experience. 
He grew by eating. He could not have 
grown in any other way. All through His 
boyhood He had eaten the scriptures and 
gotten them thoroughly into His blood. He 
had drunk His mother's prayers. He had 
eaten the Psalms in the synagogue. He had 
eaten the sacrifices in the temple. He had 
listened to what God had said in the silences 
of His life, and He had obeyed Him al- 
ways. That is why He could say: " Man 
shall not live by bread alone, but by every 
[42] 



HOW TO GROW 

word that proceedeth out of the mouth of 
God." How did He know that? He had 
tried it. " My meat is to do the will of Him 
that sent Me; I do always those things 
which are pleasing unto Him." What was 
the result? He grew like a lily. Indeed, 
men love to call Him the lily of the valley, 
the fairest of ten thousand, the one alto- 
gether lovely. Simply by doing what God 
wanted him to do, by eating every day the 
food which His Heavenly Father bounti- 
fully supplied, he grew into a lovely flower 
whose perfume has filled all the world, into 
a mighty King of whose government there 
shall be no end. 

" And the child grew." That is what we 
want you all to do. We do not want you to 
work. We do not ask you to be men and 
women just yet. We do not want you to 
think or speak or act like grown folks. We 
want you to be children, that is, we want 
[43] 



HOW TO GROW 

you to grow. We are interested in your 
growth, and so, also, is God. Did you ever 
wonder why your body grows so slowly? 
A colt grows faster than a boy, a calf grows 
faster than a girl, but that is because colt 
and calf are animals and you are immor- 
tal beings. God holds your body back in 
order that your mind may have a chance to 
grow. Wonderful changes are taking 
place in your brain. God is perfecting a 
wonderful instrument on which you are to 
play all the grand music of life. He keeps 
you a child as long as he can, in order that 
the foundation work inside of you may be 
completed. He wants you to increase in all 
beautiful affections. He wants you to 
abound in all lovely virtues and graces. He 
wants you to grow in the stature and glory 
of your spirit. He lengthens the years of 
youth because you are his children, and 
heirs of immortality. Things that grow 
[44] 



HOW TO GROW 
fast die soon. A flower grows rapidly and 
fades early. An oak grows slowly, but lives 
a century. Boys and girls grow slowly be- 
cause they are children of the Highest, 
and, like him, are to live forever and ever. 
Grow, then, both in body and in spirit. 
May it be the ambition of your life to 
grow. May you grow up into Him in all 
things who is the head of the church. May 
you grow in grace, and in the knowledge of 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 



[45] 



Ill 

THE DUTY OF ASKING 
QUESTIONS 

" Hearing them and asking them ques- 
tions." Luke 2:46. 
Preached Sunday Morning 
May II, 1902 



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THE DUTY OF ASKING 
QUESTIONS 

A YEAR ago I spoke to you about 
the secret of growth: let me talk 
to you this morning on the duty of 
asking questions. 

Of course you have all asked questions. 
It is the habit of boys and girls. A boy 
who has a tongue is sure to ask questions 
not a few, and if he had no tongue he would 
ask questions with his eyes or face or fingers. 
A child would not be a child if it never 
asked a question. 

But I wonder how many of you have ever 
looked upon the work of asking questions as 
your business. Indeed it is the only busi- 
ness which you have. The boys are not old 
enough to be mechanics, merchants or 
lawyers, and the girls are too young to be 
[49] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
trained nurses, dressmakers or housekeep- 
ers. You cannot enter just now any of the 
businesses which belong to grown people, 
but you have a business of your own, and 
that is the business of asking questions. 

This business has been given to you by 
God. You are never so well employed as 
you are when you are asking questions. 
Jesus, you remember, one day went to 
Jerusalem to attend a religious festival with 
his father and mother. It was a great day 
in his life. When the time arrived to re- 
turn home the boy Jesus was not ready to go. 
He was not able to walk all the way from 
Jerusalem to Nazareth because he carried 
on his mind such a bundle of unanswered 
questions. And so instead of turning his 
face toward Nazareth he lingered behind 
in the temple. His parents started off 
without him and did not notice his disap- 
pearance for several hours. Returning to 
[50] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

the city they looked for him here and there 
but did not find him. At last on the third 
day they found him among the Doctors in 
the temple hearing them and asking them 
questions. When his mother asked him 
why he had stayed behind, his reply was: 
"Wist ye not that I must be about my 
father's business?" Now Jesus was the 
ideal boy of all the world. If for him to 
ask questions was to be about his father's 
business, you may be quite sure that in ask- 
ing questions you are doing what your 
Heavenly Father would have you do. 

Because Jesus asked questions he grew. 
The mind grows by feeding on the material 
which questions gather and bring in. He 
waxed strong in spirit. The soul that 
comes in contact with other souls in an ef- 
fort to obtain their treasures, is certain to 
increase in strength. He became filled 
with wisdom, so full he was that he became 
[51] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

the wonder of the town. When he had 
passed his thirtieth birthday he spoke one 
day in the synagogue in Nazareth. The 
people listened to him in astonishment. 
"Whence hath this man this wisdom," they 
said to one another, and then went on to 
ask, " Is not this the carpenter's son? " — just 
as much as to say, a boy brought up in a 
carpenter's shop cannot know enough to 
talk in church! Poor, mistaken people, 
they did not know that a boy can learn any- 
where, in a shop, on a farm, in a coal mine, 
on the streets selling papers or blacking 
boots, provided only that he is willing to 
listen and ask questions. 

In developing this faculty for asking 
questions Jesus fitted himself for his future 
work. He became the expert question- 
asker of all time. He never could have 
succeeded as he did, had he not had a genius 
for asking questions. It was his custom to 
[52] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
draw people to him by asking them a ques- 
tion. When he heard the footsteps of two 
bashful young men behind him walking 
along the river bank, he broke the ice and 
made it easy for them to speak to him by 
asking, "What seek ye?" One day, while 
on his way through Samaria, he sat down on 
the curbing of Jacob's well, and while rest- 
ing there a poor, degraded woman came to 
draw a jug of water. She was separated 
from him by thick, high walls of ignorance 
and prejudice, but he pushed the walls all 
over with a gentle question, "Will you 
please give me a drink of water?" 

On one occasion he was passing through 
a crowded street, and suddenly he ex- 
claimed, "Who touched me?" He asked 
the question to encourage a timid-hearted 
woman who had reached forth her finger to 
touch his garment in the throng. He drew 
his own disciples ever closer to him by 
1531 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

affectionate inquiries. "Whom say ye that 
I am?" "Are ye able to drink of this 
cup?" It was in this way that he secured 
confessions from his chosen friends, which 
held them as with hoops of steel. 

And then he educated men, and de- 
veloped in them new life by pricking them 
with questions. "What think ye?" — that 
was one of his favorite interrogations. 
With Jesus standing before a man with such 
a question on his lips the man was com- 
pelled to think. Another favorite question 
was, " Have ye not read? " If they had not 
read before they certainly would begin to 
read forthwith. If he found people weak 
and hopeless and nearly dead, he was almost 
certain to pierce them with some such ques- 
tion as, " What wilt thou that I should do 
unto thee? " Our Lord taught men how to 
live by asking them questions. 

Time and again he protected himself. 
[54] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

from his enemies by means of questions. 
He was always in a lion's den and the only 
club which it was possible for him to use 
was a question. The Pharisees and Sad- 
ducees and Scribes and other big folks in 
Jerusalem did not like him, and they used 
to stand round him like so many hyenas, 
licking their jaws, and eager to eat him up ; 
but when he wanted to make them run, all 
that he had to do was to say, " Let me ask 
you one question." One question was 
enough to rout the whole of them. 

One day all his enemies got together in a 
corner and framed a lot of questions which 
they felt certain would bring him to de- 
struction. Jesus listened to them and an- 
swered them one after another, and then 
proceeded to ask some questions of his own. 
The result was that when evening came he 
was complete master of the field. This is 
the way St. Matthew relates the result of 
[55] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

the battle: — "No man was able to answer 
him a word, neither durst any man from 
that day forth ask him any more questions." 
Why not? Because they were afraid he 
would ask them another question. 

It was with questions that Jesus punished 
people when they did what it was not right 
for them to do. He could hold men back 
sometimes from doing wrong simply by 
asking a question. One day his disciples 
were on the point of running away. Every- 
body else had gone, and they all looked so 
sad and frightened that Jesus supposed they 
were going too. And so he said, " Would 
ye also go away? " Right in their midst he 
reared that personal question, and what 
could they do? Simon Peter felt so 
ashamed that he replied with great earnest- 
ness: "No, indeed!" I do not know what 
Peter might have done had not Jesus asked 
him that question. 

[56] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
On the night of his betrayal Jesus took 
three of his disciples into the Garden of 
Gethsemane and asked them to watch while 
he went away deeper into the garden to 
pray. When he returned he found them 
all sleeping and this was their punishment, 
" Could ye not watch with me one hour?" 
That went through them like a dagger. It 
brought the blood. One reason why they 
ran away as soon as they got outside of the 
gate was that they were so ashamed of not 
having been able to keep awake even one 
hour. But the most terrible question which 
Jesus ever asked was the one he asked Judas 
when the traitor stepped out to betray him. 
" Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with 
a kiss?" O how that question hurt! It 
drove Judas to suicide. He could not live 
with that question sticking in him. 

And, boys and girls, do you know that I 
am afraid of Jesus' questions? Suppose he 
[57j 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

says to me when I meet him on the other 
side, "Did you do all you could for me 
while you were the Pastor of Broadway 
Tabernacle in New York City?" What 
shall I say? And what will you say when 
you meet him by and by, if he asks you, 
" Did you do all you could for me while 
you were living on the earth?" 

The questions which Jesus asked 2000 
years ago are living still. They vibrate in 
the atmosphere and we have no broom to 
sweep them away. They are in the fiber of 
the mind, sticking there like so many burrs, 
and we cannot shake them out. " Is not a 
man better than a sheep?" That will 
sound in the world's ear forever. Let me 
tell you something which always makes me 
think of Jesus' question. Whenever a horse 
falls in one of our streets several men rush 
at once to its assistance. It is beautiful to 
see them run. No matter how great a hurry 
[58] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
they are in, they will stop because a horse is 
down. They will clamber down out of 
their big wagons and leave their teams 
standing in the street in order to get the 
horse of a brother driver on his feet. One 
man strokes the poor horse's nose and speaks 
encouragingly to it, another unbuckles the 
harness, others push back the wagon in or- 
der that the unfortunate animal may have 
a chance, and by means of all this help the 
horse, unless a leg is broken, struggles to 
his feet again and the crowd goes on its 
way rejoicing. 

But I have seen a man fall in the street, 
not because the pavement was slippery, but 
because the man had put an enemy into his 
mouth to steal away his brains. And when 
he fell I have seen boys laugh, and grown- 
up men pass by on the other side with a 
look of scorn; and it is at such a time as 
this that I think of Jesus' words: " Is not a 
[59] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

man better than an animal?" There are 
other questions whi<:h still haunt the world. 
"Ten were cleansed, and where are the 
nine?" One is reminded of that question 
every time the church invites men to thank 
God for his goodness and his wonderful 
works to us all. "What shall it profit a 
man if he shall gain the whole world and 
lose his own soul?" That is a question 
from which we cannot get away. Only this 
last week I suspect that more than one man 
in the fever and strain of New York life 
said to himself: "What shall it profit a 
man?" 

The point of all this is that Jesus is the 
supreme question-asker of the world, and 
that he would never have been so wise a 
man, had he not mastered the art of asking 
questions when a boy. 

The world progresses just as men are 
willing to ask questions. The golden ages 
[60] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

were all made golden by minds which 
had questions in them and the dark ages 
have been rendered dark by minds which 
had no desire to know. The world has 
made more material progress within the 
last century than it made during the preced- 
ing 5000 years, and all because the men of 
the last century have been such experts in 
asking questions. When Jesus said, " Ex- 
cept ye become as little children ye cannot 
enter the kingdom of heaven," he meant 
that men must ask questions if they wish to 
advance; but it was not till 1600 years later 
that an Englishman by the name of Bacon 
caught the meaning of Jesus' words. The 
scientists had always worked out their 
theories and expected Nature to obey them. 
Bacon saw that if men were ever to enter 
the kingdom of science they must listen to 
Nature and ask her questions. 

That is what science has been doing for 
[61] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

the last 300 years, and that is the secret of 
her marvelous victories. The astronomers 
used to draw maps of the sky and frame 
theories as to how the stars ought to behave. 
So long as they did this astronomy made 
slight progress. By and by astronomers 
began to listen to the heavens and to ask 
them questions. One man said : " O Sun, 
where do you get your heat? " Another 
one said : " O Moon, why do you fall away 
from your orbit?" Another one asked: 
" O Jupiter, what cuts off your light? " Still 
another said: "O Uranus, why do you 
waver and lose so much time? " As soon 
as men began to ask questions, the heavens 
began to rain down answers. The result is 
modern astronomy. 

The attitude of the scientist of to-day is 

illustrated by Galileo. When a young man 

of nineteen he went one day into the 

Cathedral of Pisa and saw that the big 

[62] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
bronze lamp suspended from the lofty ceil- 
ing was slowly swinging. No one else had 
noticed that fact all that day. Galileo sat 
down and watched the lamp. He asked it 
questions, and the lamp, pleased to be thus 
noticed, courteously replied. The answers 
of that bronze lamp have been published in 
all the text books of all civilized lands, and 
before Galileo died he built one of the an- 
swers into an astronomical clock. The uni- 
verse is filled with swinging lamps, and all 
that the scientists have to do is to look and 
listen, and ask questions. 

An interrogation point lies at the begin- 
ning of the age of modern invention. Men 
were never able to invent anything until 
they began to ask questions. Take this one 
illustration. Years ago, in a little town 
in Scotland, there lived a boy whose mother 
called him Jimmy Watt. Jimmy was a 
delicate child and he could not romp and 
[63] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
run like other boys, but he was strong 
enough to ask questions. He was in the 
habit of lying on the floor in front of the 
fire and listening to the teakettle sing. One 
day he noticed that the steam played queer 
capers with the teakettle lid, and he began 
to ask the kettle a string of questions. The 
kettle began it and Jimmy ended it. What 
the kettle told the boy was afterward built 
into a steam engine, and what all is yet to 
come out of that teakettle it is impossible to 
say. The steam engine brought the rail- 
road, the railroad brought the factory, the 
factory built the city, and the city has given 
us what we call civilization — all this has 
flowed out of a question asked by a little 
sickly boy. 

Therefore, boys and girls, never hesitate 
to ask questions. Cultivate the art of doing 
it and begin at once. 

Question your parents. God has or- 
[64] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

dained them for the work of answering the 
questions which you may ask. But let me 
give you two bits of advice. Always listen 
before you ask. That is the order which 
Jesus followed. He did not ask the Doc- 
tors questions until he had heard what they 
had to say. It is foolish to ask questions 
before one has listened. Many a boy w^ould 
ask fewer questions and the questions asked 
would be wiser than they are, if he w^ould 
first pay attention to what is being said. If 
you draw your questions out of your own 
ignorance they are almost certain to be use- 
less, whereas if you draw them from the 
things which have been told you by your 
parents or your teachers they are almost 
certain to be sensible and wholesome. 

Do not expect an answer to all your ques- 
tions before sunset. Any child can ask 
questions which no one can answer, and 
every child often asks questions which 
[65] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
ought not to be answered at once. Do not 
expect answers to all your questions im- 
mediately. It would be no fun to live if all 
your questions could be answered in a min- 
ute. Some of them will be answered to- 
morrow, and some the day after, and others 
still later. In asking questions you must 
learn to wait. 

Question your teachers. That is what 
they are for. Carry your perplexities to 
your Sunday School teacher, and to your 
day school teacher, and to your pulpit 
teacher. I am always glad to answer boys 
and girls. When I was young I asked a lot 
of questions, and the answers to many of 
them are tucked away in the pigeon holes of 
my mind. You may have some of these an- 
swers if you ask for them. 

There are two great books which you 
ought to question every day. One of these 
is the Bible. You ought never to read a 
[66] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

page of the big book without asking some 
such question as why, where, when, how, or 
of what value is this to me? The Bible is 
full of wisdom, but you cannot get it unless 
you ask questions. 

The other book which ought to be 
quizzed every day is the Dictionary. A 
dictionary ought to lie at the center of every 
home, and boys and girls ought to go to it 
more frequently than to the dinner table. 
Whenever you meet a word walking up and 
down the avenues of public speech to which 
you have not been introduced, just take it 
by the throat and lead it to the dictionary 
that you may see just who and what it is. 
Downtown there is a room known as the 
" Rogues' Gallery." In that room are pre- 
served the photographs of a host of bad men 
and bad women, with a brief history of their 
lives. Whenever a criminal is caught the 
officers go to the Rogues' Gallery to find out 
[67] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
just who the culprit is and how many bad 
things he has been guilty of, in different 
sections of the land. 

Now a printed word is the photograph 
of a spoken word. A dictionary is a gallery 
filled with the photographs of words. The 
good are there and so also are the bad, and 
whenever you meet an unknown word it is 
your duty to take it at once to the dictionary 
that you may find out where the word came 
from, what it means, and what kind of work 
it has been doing in the world. If you will 
form at once the habit of consulting the dic- 
tionary every day, and carry the habit with 
you through the years, you will grow in 
strength and in wisdom all the time. It is 
a beautiful feature of a dictionary that it 
never loses its patience. You can question 
it all day long and it will be as gentle and 
good-natured at evening as it was in the 
morning. It can never be provoked. It 
[68] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 
gives its answers without a frown. I can- 
not say so much of all parents and teachers. 

Go to Nature with earnest questionings. 
Watch her closely and ask her the reasons 
for her actions. Never look at the sky or 
the ocean without throwing a question at it. 
Never walk through the woods and listen to 
the singing of birds or the hum of insects 
without allowing questions to form them- 
selves in your mind. Nature loves to be 
questioned. She delights to give answers to 
those who most diligently inquire of her. 
If you will listen to her and then ask her 
questions she may be as kind to you as she 
was to Agassiz and sing to you " night and 
day the rhymes of the universe," and if ever 
the way seems long or your heart begins to 
fail "she will sing you a more wonderful 
song or tell you a more wonderful tale." 

Carry your questions to God. Does he 
not say "Ask." If you ask for bread he 
[69] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

will surely not give you a stone. We owe 
a debt of gratitude to the disciples because 
they asked Jesus so many questions. Some 
of the most beautiful things in the Gospels 
were drawn from him by questions. I love 
Simon Peter because he was so inquisi- 
tive. Would that he had asked more 
questions than he did! Never hesitate to 
carry your questions to the Heavenly 
Father. He is interested in your problems 
and your difficulties and will give you all 
the light which it is best and possible for 
you to have. Of course he will not an- 
swer all your questions just now, but they 
will all be answered some day. Like our 
earthly parents he is obliged to postpone 
many of his answers until such times as we 
may be able to bear them. One of the joys 
of heaven will be getting answers to ques- 
tions which we have asked him here on 
earth. But question him. Asking ques- 
[70] 



DUTY OF ASKING QUESTIONS 

tions is a part of worship. Follow the 
example of the Psalmist, with whose words 
I bring my sermon to a close : 

" One thing have I desired of the Lord, 
that I will seek after; that I may dwell in 
the house of the Lord all the days of my 
life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and 
to inquire in his temple." 



[71] 



IV 

THE BEAUTY OF 
OBEDIENCE 

"And was subject unto them." 

Luke 2: 51. 
Preached Sunday Morning 
May 10, 1903 



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THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

AND was subject unto them." That 
is the way it runs in our King 
James' Bible, but William Tyndale, 
who translated the Gospel of Luke eighty- 
five years before King James brought out 
his new Bible, wrote it thus — " He was 
obedient to them." Over two hundred 
years before Tyndale lived, John Wyclif 
had translated Luke's words, " and was sub- 
ject to them" and the scholars of King 
James preferred to follow Wyclif rather 
than Tyndale, using subject instead of obe- 
dient, although both words mean almost 
the same thing. 

To be obedient is to be subject, and to be 

subject is what? If you take hold of the 

word subject at both ends and pull hard 

you will pull it in two. In one hand you 

[75] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

will have a little word ^^ sub," which every- 
body knows means under. New Yorkers 
call their tunnel " subway," because it runs 
under all the other ways on Manhattan 
Island. In the other hand you will have a 
piece of a Latin word which means to place 
or lay or throw or bring. So that when 
Luke says Jesus was subject to his parents, 
he means that Jesus laid himself under 
their authority and dominion and control. 
Now if you should look for this sentence 
in the Greek Testament you would find in 
place of the word " subject" a large, plump 
word containing thirteen letters, and if you 
should ask me why so long a word in Greek 
is necessary when a short word is used in 
English, I should answer that the Greek 
word is large because it has more meaning 
in it than our little English word contains. 
The Greek word tells us that Jesus was 
habitually subject, he was subject right 
[76] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 
along, all the time, without ceasing. His 
subjection was not spasmodic or intermittent 
or occasional, but it was a continuous and 
settled habit of his life. From day to day 
and from year to year he laid himself down 
under the dominion of his parents. Joseph 
is King, Mary is Queen, their home is a 
Kingdom and in this kingdom the boy Jesus 
is a subject. 

He was subject. There is a lesson in the 
pronoun " He." Every boy thinks that he 
is a wonderful boy, and in thinking this 
every boy is right. God never made a boy 
who was not wonderful. And every boy 
thinks he is an exceptional boy, and this also 
is right, for no boy is like any other boy who 
ever was or ever will be. And every boy 
thinks he knows some things better than his 
parents, and here again the boy is not mis- 
taken, for a boy knows things about his own 
thoughts and feelings and his companions 
[77] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 
which his parents do not know. And be- 
cause a boy is so wonderful and exceptional 
and knowing, he sometimes feels that it is 
beneath his dignity to lay himself down un- 
der the dominion of his parents' will. 
There are times, he thinks, when obedience 
ceases to be a virtue, and when he has a 
right to do as he wills or wishes. But this 
evidently is a mistake. 

Jesus was a wonderful boy, and a boy 
quite exceptional, and he knew many things 
which his parents did not know. They did 
not even know that at the age of twelve he 
must be about his Father's business, and yet 
this wonderful boy with all his knowledge 
laid himself down beneath his parents' will. 
This is what the model boy does, and there- 
fore if any other boy does something differ- 
ent he is not the kind of boy which God 
would have him be. 

He was subject unto them. Mark the 
[78] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

pronoun " them," for it is easy to overlook 
it. The Bible is always particular when- 
ever it speaks of children's duties to bring 
in both parents. It does this from the be- 
ginning. Is it not written in the Deca- 
logue : " Honor thy father and thy 
mother"? When Moses laid down regula- 
tions for the government of the people this 
was one of the severest of his laws: " If a 
man have a stubborn and rebellious son, 
which will not obey the voice of his father, 
or the voice of his mother, all the men of 
his city shall stone him with stones that he 
die." 

When Paul writes to the children of Asia 
Minor he says, " Children obey your par- 
ents," and that letter " s " is one of the most 
important letters in the entire Bible. I 
have read of boys who evidently did not 
know the " s " is there. They made a dis- 
tinction between their father and their 
[79] 



TPIE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

mother, placing the former on a higher 
pedestal than the latter. Their ears were 
attentive to their father's voice, but strange 
to say they could not hear their mother. 
They said to themselves — " She is nothing 
but a woman, and a woman is not to be 
obeyed." But all such boys are unlike the 
boy Jesus. Jesus made Joseph king and 
Mary queen, and he was subject to both of 
them. When they spoke he listened and 
when they commanded he obeyed. 

And if a boy does not obey both his 
mother and his father there is something 
wrong with him. The model boy acted in 
no such manner and the boy who will not 
hearken to his mother is not the kind of 
boy which God would have him be. In- 
deed, I am inclined to think that Jesus' 
obedience to his mother was even swifter 
and more joyous than his obedience to his 
father, for I have no doubt that Jesus was 
[80] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 
ever gallant, and that his heart was full of 
chivalry. To be chivalrous is to have high 
respect for woman. 

In the middle ages the world was dark, 
and lawlessness abounded in many lands. 
There were bad and reckless men who had 
no regard for weakness, and because woman 
was defenceless she was often the victim of 
their strength. But the hearts of men were 
not wholly brutal, and there sprang up a 
company of heroes known as knights, sworn 
to protect and reverence woman. To do 
this it was necessary to dress in armor and 
carry a lance and other weapons, and again 
and again the knights were obliged to 
battle, in order that women might not be 
abused. So true and courageous were 
many of these knights that poets and novel- 
ists and historians have loved to write about 
them even to the present day. 
Now every right-minded boy ought to be 
[8i] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

a knight, and when barbarian boys speak 
disrespectfully of women, and refuse to obey 
their own mother, the boy with the chival- 
rous heart ought to stand up in her defense, 
and say with pride, " I am not ashamed to 
obey my mother, for to me she is the queen 
of all the women on the earth!" That is 
the way the boy Jesus acted toward his 
mother, and when he became a man his 
mother was so proud of him and had such 
boundless confidence in his goodness that 
she said to people wherever she went, 
" Whatsoever he saith unto you do it! " A 
boy who obeys his mother can be trusted 
when he is a man. 

He went down with them. It was not 
an easy thing to do. It would have been 
far more pleasant to stay in Jerusalem. 
For Jerusalem was the capital of the 
Nation. It was filled with glorious things 
and interesting people. It had great 
[82] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

market places and famous pools and splen- 
did palaces and the great temple built by 
Herod with its gold and marble and pre- 
cious stones, with its candlesticks and altar 
and the holy of holies. And it was in 
Jerusalem that all the big people lived, the 
scholars and orators and rulers, the men 
whose very shadow was an inspiration. 

And what was there in little Nazareth? 
Nazareth was only a tiny country town, 
very slow and very sleepy. There was noth- 
ing going on in Nazareth. There were no 
lovely buildings there. The little syna- 
gogue was no more like the Temple than a 
log cabin is like the White House. And 
nobody lived in Nazareth, no scholars, no 
soldiers, no rulers, no great merchants, no 
men whom it was worth one's while to 
know. 

Yet Jesus went down from Jerusalem and 
came to Nazareth, and laid himself under 
[83] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

the dominion of a carpenter and his peasant 
wife. How much more delightful it would 
have been to hear wise men speaking in a 
marble temple, than to pick up shavings in 
a carpenter shop in cheap and prosy Naza- 
reth. But Jesus was obedient, even when 
the paths of obedience were not pleasant. 

I have known boys who have refused to 
come down from Jerusalem and go to Naza- 
reth. They have seated themselves in the 
temple of their own stubborn will and when 
their father or mother has said "Gomel" 
they have said "I won't!" They have 
settled themselves with a book, or they have 
plunged headlong into a game, or they 
have given themselves up to some thing 
which pleased them, and they have im- 
pudently refused to go to Nazareth. But 
no such children are like Jesus. I will tell 
you what they are like. They are like an 
animal. An animal never does anything it 
[84] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

does not want to do unless it is driven to it. 
An animal follows its own inclination. It 
takes the path which is easiest. Who ever 
heard of an animal doing of its own accord 
anything which was unpleasant or hard? 

If you are like an animal you will never 
obey unless you are whipped into obedience. 
But if you want to be like the model boy 
you will obey no matter what it costs. You 
will never say, Is this pleasant? but, Is this 
right? Not, Do I want to do this? but, 
Ought I to do this? What difference does 
it make whether it is pleasant or not, or 
whether you want to do it or not? Do your 
father and mother want you to do it? If 
they do, then do it! If you are not willing 
to come down from the temple in Jerusalem 
to the shavings and sawdust of Nazareth, 
you are not the kind of boy which God 
would have every boy to be. 

And behold the reward! St. Luke will 
[85] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

not close his chapter without telling us what 
it was. " And Jesus advanced in wisdom 
and stature, and in favor with God and 
men." He grew to be so strong a man that 
he has impressed all succeeding generations, 
and although nineteen hundred years have 
passed since he made his home in Palestine, 
all men everywhere are agreed that his was 
the most beautiful life ever yet lived upon 
this earth. 

It was his obedience which made it beau- 
tiful. He used to say, " My meat is to do 
the will of him that sent me," " I do always 
those things which are pleasing unto him," 
" Not my will but thine be done," and at the 
end of life he could say, " I have finished 
the work which thou gavest me to do." It 
was the obedience of Jesus which Paul, 
thought was the climax of Jesus' life and 
the trait most worthy of being held up for 
our imitation. " Let this mind be in you 
[86] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

which was also in Christ Jesus, who became 
obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross!" 

Of the virtues out of which a noble char- 
acter is built, obedience is the first and most 
important. It is the corner-stone of the 
temple. According to the Bible the fore- 
most of the virtues is obedience, and the first 
of all sins is disobedience. Disobedience is 
the nest in which all other sins are hatched; 
obedience is the root out of which all other 
virtues grow. "As through the one man's 
disobedience the many were made sinners, 
even so through the obedience of one shall 
the many be made righteous." 

After the fall, the human race did not 
make a successful start toward God until 
the time of Abraham. " Abraham when 
he was called, obeyed, and he went out not 
knowing whither he went." The greatest 
of the patriarchs is immortal because of his 
[87] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

obedience. Moses, the greatest of the Law 
givers, was always saying to the people : '' If 
you obey God you shall live, if you disobey 
him you shall die." Samuel, the greatest 
of the Judges, says to Saul, the first of the 
Kings: ^'To obey is better than sacrifice, 
and to hearken than the fat of rams." 
Isaiah, the greatest of the prophets, says: 
'' If ye be obedient ye shall eat the good of 
the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall 
be devoured with the sword; for the mouth 
of Jehovah hath spoken it." 

Jesus, who is prophet, lawgiver, and 
judge combined, says to a young man who 
wants to know how to secure eternal life, 
" Keep the commandments." At the begin- 
ning of his public career Jesus said, " Take 
my yoke upon you," and at the close he said, 
" Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I 
command you." Everywhere and always 
he declared '' He that wills to do God's will 
[88] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

shall know." That means that obedience 
comes first, and that men must obey in the 
dark. 

Have you ever thought of the beauty of 
obedience? It is the most beautiful of all 
the virtues. If you do not believe this look 
at an army. What makes an army beauti- 
ful? Not the gold braid or the bright but- 
tons or the glittering bayonets, but obedi- 
ence. An army is organized on the prin- 
ciple of obedience. Every man must obey 
his superior and obey him instantly. If a 
man will not obey he is not a soldier, and 
must be drummed out of the regiment. A 
good soldier always obeys. 

Many years ago an English ship called 
the Birkenhead was wrecked at sea. It was 
crowded with passengers, four hundred of 
them being British soldiers. There were 
boats sufficient only for the women and chil- 
dren, and there was nothing for the soldiers 
[89] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

to do but to die. Captain Wright ordered 
them on deck. Each man fell into his place 
without a murmur, and there they stood, si- 
lent and magnificent, until the ship heeled 
over and went down under them. I count 
that one of the most beautiful spectacles to 
be met with in the history of the world. 
Tennyson has given us another such picture 
in his " Charge of the Light Brigade.'' 

"Forward, the Light Brigade! " 
Was there a man dismay'd? 
Not tho' the soldier knew 
Some one had blundered; 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why. 
Theirs but to do and die: 
Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 

Cannon to right of them. 

Cannon to left of them. 

Cannon In front of them » 

[90] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

Volley'd and thunder'd; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well, 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell 
Rode the six hundred. 

Cannon to right of them. 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon behind them 
Volley'd and thunder'd; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
While horse and hero fell, 
They that had fought so well 
Came thro' the jaws of Death, 
Back from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them, 
Left of six hundred. 

When can their glory fade? 
O the wild charge they made! 
All the world wonder'd. 
Honor the charge they made! 
Honor the Light Brigade, 
Noble six hundred! 

[91] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

Why noble? Because they obeyed. 

Anything so beautiful as obedience is 
valuable above rubies. Who can express 
the worth of it? It is the best gift which 
parents can possibly give to their children. 
It is a part of education, the most important 
part, and if a boy or girl does not learn the 
habit of obedience he or she is not educated, 
even though they may read many languages 
and be experts in science and mathematics. 
It is the best fortune which parents can be- 
queath to their children, and boys and girls 
who do not learn at home the virtue of 
obedience are unfortunate, even though 
their parents should give them a million 
dollars. For unless children learn obedi- 
ence in the home, they are not likely to learn 
it anywhere, and a man or woman who is 
self-willed and incapable of obeying is 
never happy, and is often mischievous if not 
dangerous. 

[92] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 
No one makes a good citizen who does 
not obey the laws. What a lovely country 
this would be if all people were obedient: 
no jails, no prisons, no penitentiaries any- 
where. And what a deal of misery and 
suffering we should be spared if all men and 
women in America had been taught when 
children to reverence laws and been trained 
to habits of obedience. Abhor above 
everybody else the man who disobeys the 
law! He is a traitor to his country and a 
man to be afraid of. 

If a rich man breaks the law, and joins 
with other rich men in breaking it, and 
because he is rich and mighty sets the laws 
of his country at defiance, he ought to have 
his fine clothes stripped from his back, and 
he ought to be dressed in a striped suit, and 
they ought to put him in a prison and feed 
him on bread and water, and make him 
work hard every day, and keep him in 
[93] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

chains until he expressed a willingness to 
obey the laws. Never admire or praise or 
respect any man who tramples on the laws 
of his city, state, or nation. 

And if a poor man breaks the law he 
too must be caught and punished. Justice 
must be measured out to rich and poor alike. 
And if the poor man joins with other poor 
men to trample on the rights of others and 
to destroy property and to take life, then he 
must be seized immediately and made to 
suffer for his heinous crime. There must 
be no delay, and no excuse-making in deal- 
ing with the criminal. 

Men who trample on law, no matter who 
they are or what they want or how just 
their cause, are dangerous criminals, and 
must be made to pay the full penalty of 
their wicked deeds. Our flag is not a beau- 
tiful flag unless it floats over the heads of 
law-keeping men and women, and the very 
[94] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

foundations of our Republic are shaken 
when any class of men, high or low, defy 
their country's laws. 

Nor can the Christian church be beauti- 
ful or strong unless its members are obedi- 
ent. If they do, each one as he pleases, pay- 
ing no attention to the rules which they 
have promised to obey, then they bring dis- 
grace upon themselves and scandal on the 
church. Every good Christian lays him- 
self down under the dominion of the laws 
of his church. Without obedience, a beau- 
tiful home, a strong government, and a 
church worthy of Jesus Christ are impos- 
sible. 

What reward is offered to the obedient 

soul? Long life, joy, peace, power, God! 

» 

It is the only thing for which the Bible 
offers a reward. It is the one thing which 
God everywhere expects and imperatively 
demands. The Bible offers us no reward for 
[95] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

our time or our strength or our money or 
our hymn singing or our church going or 
prayer saying, but it offers everything for 
the surrender of the will. There is no 
goodness without obedience. No matter 
what you think or feel or wish or hope or 
intend or resolve, you are displeasing to 
God unless you obey him. The one thing 
to seek, then, every day and always is an 
obedient heart. 

How can we obey? We must practice 
obedience. We must take exercises in it. 
It is not enough to know that one ought to 
obey, he must put his knowledge into prac- 
tice. He must work at it. It is no easy 
job. It is a harder problem than any of 
those you get at school. It cannot be 
solved in a week or a year. But God gives 
you time. He keeps you near your par- 
ents ten, fifteen, twenty years in order that 
this great habit of obedience may be thor- 
[96] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

oughly and forever established. But no 
matter how much time you have you never 
can learn obedience w^ithout help from 
above. 

Saul of Tarsus v^as one of the strongest 
men who ever lived. He was a mental 
giant. But this is his confession: "The 
good which I would I do not; but the evil 
which I would not that I practice. O 
wretched man that I am who shall deliver 
me?" And in the midst of his weakness 
and defeat he found one strong to save, 
Jesus of Nazareth, God's only Son. He 
gave himself to Jesus unreservedly and with 
all his might, and doing this he was able to 
say, " I can do all things through him who 
strengthens me." If you want to be obedi- 
ent, pray to God to help you. 

Give yourself to Jesus, the only perfectly 
obedient man our world has ever known. 
It is by following his example and drinking 
1 97] 



THE BEAUTY OF OBEDIENCE 

in his spirit and relying on his promises that 
you will be able to master, little by little, 
with many a slip and failure, but with ever 
increasing confidence and success, the high 
and difficult art of obeying. 



[98] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 

*' Wist ye not that I must be about 

my Father's business? " Luke 2: 49. 

Preached Sunday Morning 

May 8, 1904 



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MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 

JESUS has passed his twelfth birthday. 
He is no longer a boy. He is a man. 
Not a grown man, but nevertheless a 
man; a young man, or as we would say, a 
youth. He can now do things he has never 
done before. He can wear phylacteries, 
little leathern cases containing scrolls writ- 
ten over with texts of Scripture. He is 
now a son of the commandment, a son of 
the law. He is a member of the congrega- 
tion and must attend the services and ob- 
serve the fasts. It is time now to begin the 
learning of a trade. He can also begin the 
study of the Talmud, a big book into which 
little boys are not allowed to look. 

But best of all he can go to Jerusalem to 
attend the three great national feasts. And 
so now he is going to the Passover. He has 
[loi] I ^ 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
never been in Jerusalem since he was a 
baby. For years he has wanted to go, and 
now he is going. Jerusalem is the greatest 
city in all Palestine, to a Jewish boy as big 
as New York and Boston and Philadelphia 
and Chicago and Washington City all com- 
bined. Everything big is in Jerusalem, the 
big palaces and the big stores and the big 
markets and the big men, and best of all the 
great temple toward which all the good 
people in Galilee turn their faces when they 
say their prayers. Jesus has never yet seen 
the city, because it is so far away. It is 
eighty miles from Nazareth, three long 
days' journey, farther from Nazareth in 
time than Denver is from New York City. 
The time has come for Jesus to travel this 
immense distance to the City of King 
David. 

What a trip it was! It was the month 
of April and all Palestine was abloom. 

[ 102 ] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 

The birds were singing and the air was 
heavy with the fragrance of the flowers 
which everywhere greeted the eye with 
colors more gorgeous than those in the robes 
of Solomon the Magnificent. All the roads 
were filled with people, some riding and 
many walking, and the numbers constantly 
increased as the caravan approached the 
city. Bands of men and women, young and 
old, came out from every city, town and 
hamlet, until the roads were choked and 
packed, and it seemed that all the world 
was flowing toward Mount Zion. And as 
the people marched they sang favorite 
stanzas from the Psalms. Listen and you 
will hear a company in the valley singing: 
" I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, 
from whence cometh my help. My help 
Cometh from the Lord, which made heaven 
and earth." And now from some hill-top 
there float down the words: "I was glad 
[103] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
when they said unto me, Let us go into the 
house of the Lord! Our feet shall stand 
within thy gates, O Jerusalem." And now 
across the scented fields there comes the 
music of this glad refrain: ''Behold how 
good and how pleasant it is for brethren to 
dwell together in unity." So they marched 
and so they sang, all the way to the city. 

What a city it was — a thousand times 
larger than little Nazareth. When the city 
burst upon the eyes of Jesus he must have 
repeated the poet's words : 

"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the 
whole earth, is Mount Zion, the city of the 
great king!" 

I will not describe the city nor attempt to 
tell you how Jesus felt when he looked upon 
the temple, with its terraces of snowy mar- 
ble and its gilded pinnacles and domes. Be- 
fore he knew it, the time had come to return 
to Nazareth. The feast of the Passover 
c [ 104 ] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
lasted a week, but attendance was obligatory 
only on the first two days, and many pil- 
grims started homeward at the end of that 
time. Joseph and Mary and a large num- 
ber of Galileans probably started north on 
the morning of the third day. They sup- 
posed that Jesus was with the other boys; 
indeed, I suspect that some good neighb 
assured Mary that Jesus was there, and that 
she had seen him with her own eyes, and it 
was not until night that it was discovered 
that Jesus was missing. 

A search was made for him among his 
relatives, and then among the Nazareth 
neighbors, but the boy was not to be found. 
It was with a heavy heart that Mary lay 
down to try to sleep. She did not sleep 
much, I think, for she thought of a thousand 
things, as mothers will, and one of the things 
she thought about was no doubt the experi- 
ence she had had with Herod years before, 
[ 105 ] 



J 




MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
when the crafty king had attempted to take 
her baby's life. Herod is dead, but is there 
another Herod in Jerusalem who has stolen 
her boy and possibly put him to death? It 
was a long, long night, and as soon as morn- 
ing came Joseph and Mary started back to 
Jerusalem. The way seemed ten times 
farther than it had seemed the day before, 
for a sad heart increases distances amaz- 
ingly. 

Late in the afternoon they reached the 
city and began to inquire at the doors of all 
the people whom they knew for information 
concerning the boy who had disappeared. 
No one had seen him. They wandered 
through the crowded streets eagerly scan- 
ning every face, but the one beautiful face 
for which they looked was nowhere to be 
seen. It was now dark, and through the 
dreary night Mary waited for the morning. 
The bazaars were early visited, and many a 
[io6] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 

booth and stall was eagerly inspected, but 
all in vain. 

Next they went to the temple, but he was 
not in any of its splendid courts. About to 
give up in despair, Mary entered a chamber 
adjoining one of the temple courts, a sort 
of schoolroom in which Bible teachers 
were wont to meet for the study of the 
Scriptures. The greatest Doctors in the 
land were in the habit of meeting here, and 
Mary timidly glanced round the room. 
And lo, there on the polished mosaic floor, 
in the very midst of the Masters of Israel, 
Jesus sat. The artist Hofmann has painted 
Jesus standing. Luke has it right: He was 
seated. He was not teaching the Rabbis, 
but being taught by them. He sat at their 
feet and listened. He listened so intently 
that the teachers were delighted. 

Nothing so delights a teacher as the atten- 
tion of a pupil. Now and then a hot ques- 
[107] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
tion would rise to his lips. The old men 
made reply and then proceeded to question 
him. His answers were so good they were 
all astonished. Jesus had studied the 
Prophets and the Psalms and had done a 
deal of thinking, and his questions were so 
keen and his answers were so wise that the 
Masters of the law were all amazed. Just 
then Mary caught his eye. Calling him 
aside, she said, " My boy, why have you 
acted in this way? Your father and I have 
looked for you everywhere, O so anxious." 
To which Jesus replied : " Did you not 
know that I must be about my Father's 
business? " 

It was a great day for surprises. The 
Rabbis were surprised at Jesus' wisdom, 
the parents were surprised that Jesus should 
leave them, the boy was surprised that his 
parents should not know just where to find 
him« He was no idle, curious sightseer, 
[io8] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
even though he was only a country boy for 
the first time in a city. He was not inter- 
ested in the marble of the palaces, or the 
uniform of the soldiers of the garrison of 
Antonia. He was no bargain seeker, look- 
ing for pretty things in the tempting booths 
and stalls. 

Jerusalem was indeed magnificent, quite 
different from little Nazareth with its cot- 
tages of mud and its dull carpenter shop 
and its dingy synagogue, but he could not 
be taken captive by his eyes. The glitter 
of the gold and the sparkle of the gems and 
the gleam of the marble and the splendor 
of the robes could not hold him even for an 
hour. Even the temple worship, with its 
white robed priests and its stately cere- 
monials and its choirs of Levites and its 
orchestra of trained musicians, was not so 
attractive as a meeting for the study of the 
Bible. He was thirsty for knowledge. He 
[109] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 

was hungry for truth, and so he turned 
away from sights which dazzled, to the doc- 
tors of the law. '' Did you not know, 
mother, that this is the place for a boy like 
me, the only place I care to be? I am sur- 
prised that you looked for me any place 
else. Did you not know that I must be 
about my Father's business?" 

These are the first recorded words of 
Jesus, and every syllable is precious. The 
poet Wordsworth says that the child is 
father of the man, and surely in these words 
of Jesus we get a hint of all that the man 
Jesus is ever to become. As in a mountain 
lake one sees reflected the mountains and the 
forests and the procession of the clouds, so 
in this single sentence of Jesus is mirrored 
the entire New Testament land and sky. 

The very tone of his question is sugges- 
tive. He is surprised that those who know 
him do not expect to find him in the House 
[no] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
of God, engaged in the study of God's word. 
Where else, he asks^ ought a boy of twelve 
to be, but at the feet of men who are ex- 
pounders of the Scriptures? And every 
boy and girl who wishes to follow the 
example of Jesus should say to every 
tempter who tries to keep him away from 
the Bible School : '' Don't you know that I 
must be about my Father's business?" A 
boy or girl is never in his place on Sunday 
morning unless he is in the Bible School. 
That any youth should be outside the school 
is of all things most surprising. 

And, if it is the natural and normal thing 
for boys and girls to be about their Father's 
business, hearing his word and obeying his 
law, then all the way through life, wherever 
and whenever there is a right thing to be 
done which you are able to do, and a wrong 
thing to be struck which you are able to 
strike, and a battle to be fought against evil 
[III] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
in which you are able to engage, you ought 
to be found in your place; and that any 
human being should ever be found any- 
where else is distressing and amazing. 
Voices will plead with you, calling you in 
other directions, but to all of these voices 
your answer should be, "Wist ye not that I 
must be about my Father's business?" 

And mark that great word ''must'' It 
was one of Jesus' earliest words, and he used 
it to the end. He was not ashamed to say 
that there were some things which he was 
obliged to do. Let no boy ever hesitate to 
say " I must." Many a man's life has been 
wrecked because he never learned, when a 
boy, to speak the words " I must." Jesus 
early learned the lesson, and so at thirty he 
could say, " I must preach the gospel." 
When men stood amazed at his tireless in- 
dustry he said, " I must work the works of 
him that sent me while 'tis day." 

[112] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
When men urged him to save himself 
from his murderous foes he said : " I must 
go to Jerusalem, I must suffer many things, 
I must be lifted up." And this made Jesus 
strong. Nobody was able to turn him 
aside from the road which he felt that he 
must travel. No one could persuade him 
not to do a thing which he was convinced 
he ought to do. His dearest friends and 
even his brothers urged him to give up his 
plans, and his reply in substance was al- 
ways this : ^' Don't you know that I must 
be about my Father's business?" Jesus 
was bound, and yet he was free. 

Boys and girls, and for that matter grown 
folks too, sometimes have curious notions of 
liberty. To be free they think is to be able 
to do just what one pleases. But true free- 
dom is the power to do what we ought to do. 
A dead leaf falling from a bough has power 
to do just what it pleases, because it is dead, 
[113] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
and no one cares how much it eddies or 
where it falls. But the big earth in travel- 
ing round the sun is very careful not to get 
outside her appointed path, for if she 
should wander even a little from the path 
which God has marked out she would up- 
set all the life upon her surface. The earth 
is far freer than an autumn leaf. It gets 
its freedom from the sun. If we were only 
dead autumn leaves we could drift and eddy 
hither and thither and do anything we 
pleased; but being immortal souls, created 
in God's image, we have a mighty work to 
do and should keep the orbit which our 
Father's love has traced. 

Jesus was the freest man who has ever 
lived upon our earth, and this is what he 
says to us every one and always: "If the 
Son shall make you free, ye shall be free in- 
deed." 

" My Father." This was Jesus' name for 
[114] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
God. When he spoke to God he always 
called him '' Father." When he was suc- 
cessful in his work, he said, " Father, I 
thank thee." When he was overcome with 
grief he cried, '^ Father, if it be possible, let 
this cup pass." When he pleaded for his 
disciples, he said, '' Father, keep through 
thine own name these whom thou hast given 
me." On the cross he prayed, ^' Father, 
forgive them," and with his last breath he 
said, " Father, into thy hands I commend 
my spirit." This is the word he wanted all 
men to use. 

When you pray, say, " Father." When 
you are worried, remember that God is your 
Father. When you ask God for blessings, 
remember how willing parents are to give 
good things to their children. And because 
everything belongs to God, Jesus treated 
everything with reverence. He would not 
allow men to swear by heaven or the earth 
[115] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
or Jerusalem or their own head, for all these 
belonged to his Heavenly Father. He 
drove the traders from the temple because 
they were desecrating the temple of his 
Father. He cheered the hearts of his dis- 
ciples by reminding them that the house of 
many mansions belongs to the Heavenly 
Father. All people were dear to Jesus be- 
cause all of them were the children of God. 
Beggars and lepers and blind men and bad 
men, the most loathsome and forsaken of 
men were dear to his heart because they be- 
longed to his Father in heaven. To be 
worthy of his Father was his constant ambi- 
tion and unfailing delight. "My meat," 
he said, " is to do his will and to finish his 
work." 

When only twelve Jesus had grasped the 
great idea that life must be lived for a pur- 
pose. There is business to do and the busi- 
ness belongs to God. In the temple Jesus 
[ii6] 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
forgets all about himself. Some boys study 
because they are compelled to, or because 
they want to make a show, or because they 
expect to use their education in making 
money later on, but Jesus listened to his 
teachers and pondered the lessons which 
they set him in order to advance the glory of 
his Father. All kinds of work take on new 
luster when we think of it as being given to 
us by our Father. Men sometimes say, 
" My business," " my studies," ^' my plans," 
forgetting that God has anything to do with 
them. Everything we do, if we do it 
rightly, is our Father's business. It is ours 
and it is also his. Our life is ours and his, 
so also is our work. We are interested in 
our tasks, and so is he. We bend over our 
studies, and so does he. Everything that 
touches us also touches him, and that boys 
and girls should obey their parents and pay 
attention to their teachers is not only their 



MY FATHER'S BUSINESS 
business, but it is also the business of the 
Heavenly Father. 

Begin to-day, if you have not begun be- 
fore, to live and work for God. That is 
something you cannot begin too early. 
Whatever you do at home or in school, at 
work or in play, do for his glory. Use your 
life as a gift given you for a high and holy 
purpose, and remembering that you are en- 
gaged in your Father's business you will 
never be overcome. Like the Master you 
will often say, " I must," and like him, when 
you are urged to turn aside, you will say, ^' I 
have a baptism to be baptized with, and 
how am I straitened till it be accom- 
plished, " Like him you will drink the cup 
which the Father gives you to drink, and 
like him you will be able to exclaim with a 
voice of triumph, when life has reached its 
close, " I have finished the work which thou 
gavest me to do." 

[ii8] 



VI 

THE SILENT YEARS 

*' And Jesus advanced in wisdom and 

stature and in favor vi^ith God and 

man." Luke 2: 52. 

Preached Sunday Morning 

May 14, igos 



^^t^^ 







THE SILENT YEARS 

I WANT to think with you about the 
silent years of Jesus. By "silent 
years " is usually meant the period be- 
tween the day on which Jesus was found in 
the temple, and the day on which he ap- 
peared at the river Jordan to be baptized 
by the prophet John. Through all this 
stretch of eighteen years we do not catch a 
glimpse of Jesus or hear a syllable from his 
lips. We listen, but there is not the sug- 
gestion of a rustle. We shout our questions, 
but the silence sends back no echo. This 
period is a sort of Sahara desert with not one 
oasis in it at which the weary Bible student 
can pause and quench his thirst. From the 
age of twelve to the age of thirty the years 
of Jesus are silent. 

And the same may be said of the years 

[121] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
between his birth and his appearance in the 
temple. These twelve years may be added 
to the following eighteen, so that we have 
thirty years of silence. How little is told 
us of the birth and infancy of Jesus. We 
know he was born in Bethlehem, that wise 
men visited him there, that he was brought 
when a few weeks old into the temple at 
Jerusalem, that he was carried for safety 
into Egypt and thence to Nazareth in 
Galilee — and that is all. The years come 
and go, and not a voice breaks the silence 
until the boy is twelve years old. Then the 
curtain is lifted, but only for an instant. 
We catch a glimpse of a boyish face, we 
hear the music of a boy's voice asking a 
question, and then the curtain drops, not to 
rise again until the man Jesus meets the 
prophet from the desert at the river Jordan. 
It is surprising that since that curtain 
fell no one has yet been found strong 
[122] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

enough to raise it. It is one of the wonders 
of the life of Jesus that thirty years are si- 
lent. When you count the miracles of the 
New Testament do not forget this miracle 
of silence. When you marvel at the things 
which are said do not fail to marvel at the 
things which are not said. How surprising 
it is that almost nothing of those thirty years 
has as yet been discovered. Why did not 
the apostles go back to Nazareth and gather 
up information in regard to what Jesus said 
and did as a boy, and write it down for the 
instruction of countless generations which 
would have treasured every word? Or 
why did not one of the more than six hun- 
dred converts whom Jesus left behind him 
on the day of his ascension question the men 
and women of Nazareth about their towns- 
man, and find out at least some of the things 
which he did as a boy, a youth, a man? 
It is amazing that of all the Christians 

[123] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
who lived in the last half of the first cen- 
tury not one was able to put down on paper 
a single item of information concerning 
these thirty long and wonderful years which 
has reached a modern eye, although thou- 
sands of keen-eyed men have searched dili- 
gently for just such a priceless treasure. 
Here is a thing which the wisest men of our 
time are not able to do — they are not able 
to find out what Jesus did or said through 
these thirty years of silence. They can do 
almost anything else. They can soar into 
the dark stellar spaces, and measure the 
stars and weigh them; they can delve into 
the earth and read the secrets of the rocks ; 
they can dive into the ocean and make a 
map of its wonderful floor; they have been 
for many years ransacking the mounds and 
tombs and ruins of buried cities, bringing 
forth all sorts of treasures, but not one scrap 
of authentic information concerning those 
[124] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
thirty years of silence has as yet been 
brought to light. A mangled sentence here 
and there has been discovered v/hich may 
possibly have come from his lips, but un- 
certainty hangs round all such sayings, and 
not one of them adds anything of value to 
the information already given in the four 
gospels. 

Why these long years of silence? The 
mystery becomes greater when we bear in 
mind who Jesus was. He was the greatest 
man who has ever lived, the holiest of the 
mighty and the mightiest of the holy. He 
was the Prince of Glory, the Prince of 
Peace. He was the Messiah, the Savior of 
the world, God's only-begotten Son, God's 
well-beloved Son whom all men are to love 
and honor, the lamb who takes away the 
sins of the world, the teacher who said: 
" Heaven and earth shall pass away but my 
words shall not pass away." And yet nine- 
[125] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

tenths of the life of this man of men, this 
King of the Nations, is a total blank. The 
curtain is down and no one can lift it. The 
curtain is thick and no one can see 
through it. 

If you ask why this silence, my answer 
can be but a guess, but the guess is this: It 
pleased God to give Jesus many silent years 
in order that in all points he might be as we 
are. In living in obscurity he entered into 
the lot of mortals. Had all his life been 
open, recorded, trumpeted, he would not 
have been so near us as he is. The world 
never thinks it worth its while to chronicle 
the cooings and the prattlings of a baby. 
What does the world care for the plays, the 
^ games, the sorrows and the joys of a boy? 
What do the bookmakers care for what 
goes on in a carpenter's shop, or in any shop 
where things are made and sold? The 
routine drudgery of the world goes on from 
[126] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

day to day and from year to year without 
being heralded or written. The wise men 
did not write down the things which you 
and I did when wt were children, nor have 
they written the things which we older folks 
have" done as men. 

Life is too ordinary, prosaic, common, to 
tempt the pen of genius, and the average 
man has, as Jesus had, a life of silent years. 
If we were asked to write the story of our 
own life the story would not be long. It is 
shorter still when the writing of it is left to 
others. Only a fraction of Jesus' life was 
ever put on paper, — just enough, as an 
Apostle puts it, to persuade the world that 
Jesus is the Son of God. 

But while in one sense the years are not 
recorded, there is a sense in which every 
year is written in ink which cannot fade. 
We may not write our life on paper, but we 
write it in the Book of Life. There were in 
[127] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
a deep sense no silent years in the life of 
Jesus, no years which did not record them- 
selves in the big book of human life. Jesus 
wrote himself on Mary's heart and on 
Joseph's heart and on the hearts of all the 
members of the Nazareth home. He left 
a record of himself on the mind of every 
boy with whom he played in the street or 
with whom he roamed over the Galilean 
fields. He impressed himself on every man 
he knew in Nazareth, or with whom he did 
business, or by whose side he sat in the 
Synagogue; he was recording himself all 
the time. 

And that is what we do. We begin the 
writing of our life in our cradle. At least 
one man and one Vv^oman were different 
after we came. We have influenced more 
or less every one with whom we ever 
played and with whom we ever worked. 
We have written ourself on the hearts of all 
[128] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
our teachers. All our friends bear in them- 
selves the evidence of our living. And so 
there are no unrecorded years. In the si- 
lent years Jesus wrote himself deep in the 
life of Palestine. In those thirty years he 
influenced the thought, the feeling, and the 
choices of every one with whom he had to 
do, and that is what we all are doing all the 
time. Whether we are conscious of it or 
not, we are writing ourselves down in the 
great volume of the world's life. 

And because this is true, we must not be 
surprised to learn that the so-called silent 
years all sooner or later break into voice, 
and the hidden years, so-called, all burst 
upon the sight. No writer has told us on 
paper what Jesus did up to the age of 
thirty, and yet we know without being told. 
We have the record of three flowering years, 
and from this record we can tell just what 
Jesus said and did in the so-called years of 
[129] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

silence. Let us look at some of these things 
for a moment. 

He learned to love nature before he was 
thirty. Nazareth stood in one of the love- 
liest spots in all Palestine. Looking north 
he could see the snowy top of Hermon, and 
looking eastward the rounded dome of 
Tabor. Looking southward his eyes swept 
the lovely plain of Esdraelon, and in the 
west he saw Carmel and the shimmering 
surface of the blue Mediterranean. Every 
spring the fields round Nazareth sparkled 
and blazed like the robe of a king, and the 
great night sky with its constellations kept 
right on declaring the glory of God and 
showing forth his handiwork. While a 
boy he bathed himself in the loveliness of 
nature, became drenched with its perfumes 
and glories, and so when a man he opens his 
mouth to speak, one catches the scent of the 
fields in his sentences, and feels the beauty 
[130] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

of spring in his sermons. How naturally 
he brings in the birds and the flowers, the 
grass and the rain, the trees and the clouds, 
seeing in all of them intimations and self- 
disclosures of God. No man begins to love 
nature at thirty. That is a grace which 
must be developed in the days of one's 
youth. 

He learned to read men as well as 
Nature. Human nature is a difficult book, 
but he could read it. He loved to study 
men. He watched the children playing in 
the streets, overheard their laughter and 
their quarreling, he watched farmers at 
their work, and women at their housekeep- 
ing. He knew life in the street and in the 
fields and in the home. A little town is the 
best of schools in which to study human 
nature. In the quiet ongoing of the un- 
troubled and unhurried days men have 
ample opportunity to show themselves, and 
[131] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

in the close contacts of the little world men 
come to know what human nature is. For 
thirty years Jesus lived in a narrow country 
town, and at the end of that time he was 
master of the secrets of the heart. He knew 
men's weaknesses and biases, their preju- 
dices and passions, their whims and incon- 
sistencies ; as one of the Evangelists boldly 
puts it: "He knew all men, and needed 
I not that any should testify of man: for he 
knew what was in man." 

Another book which he learned to read 
was the Scriptures. From a boy he had 
been familiar with them, and as soon as he 
comes before us we hear him quoting the 
Bible. He does it in a way which shows 
how well he knows it. He knows it so well 
that he can use it. It takes a deal of study 
to learn the Bible so thoroughly that one 
can use it in the critical moments of life. 
Jesus always used the Scripture in beating 
[132] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
back his foes. When the devil tempted 
him he discomfited him by hurling Scrip- 
ture at him. When his enemies attacked 
him in the streets he overwhelmed them by 
quotations from the writings of holy men 
of old. When they tried to trip him up by 
quoting only a part of a sentence he could 
go on and complete it and show them they 
had grasped only a fragment of the truth. 
In his dying hour he comforted himself by 
repeating sentences from the Psalms. He 
could use Scripture as a sword, a staff or a 
pillow. All those years of silence must 
have been filled with Bible study, for no 
man begins at thirty to use the Scriptures as 
Jesus used them, if he has never studied 
them before. 

In these thirty years he formed the habit 
of praying. All through his public life he 
is a man of prayer. He prays naturally 
and always. He prays before he enters on 

[133] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
his work, after he has won his victory, and 
in the stress and strain of crowded and 
fatiguing days. He prays early in the 
morning, he prays far into the night. So 
often does he pray that men who know him 
best ask him to teach them how to do it too. 
For him to pray was easy and satisfying and 
joyful, because from a boy he had poured 
out his heart to God in the shop and in the 
fields in adoration and thanksgiving. Men 
who do not learn early how to pray are 
handicapped in their later years, and often 
find it difficult to pray. Those pray with 
greatest freedom, faith and rapture, who 
formed the habit of often speaking to God 
in the simple trustful days of childhood. 

He also formed the habit of going to 
church, or as the people in Palestine ex- 
pressed it, of going to synagogue. After 
thirty we see him ahvays in his place in the 
church on the Sabbath day. One of the 
[134] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

Evangelists tells us it was his " custom " to 
be there. The custom was formed in the 
thirty years of silence. From the earliest 
years he had been taken to the synagogue, 
and to be absent from a Sabbath service 
would have created a scandal among all 
good people in Nazareth. The modern 
foolishness had not yet taken possession of 
parents' hearts, that in religion and in re- 
ligion only we must let children do what^^ 
they please. To the end of his life Jesus 
was a churchgoer because he had estab- 
lished that habit in the days of his youth. 
He had also formed the habit of think- 
ing. As a boy he had asked questions and 
meditated, and as a carpenter he had 
thought as he had worked. It is a mistake 
to suppose that men who work with their 
hands do not think. Some of the sanest 
and finest thinking in the world has been 
done by men who all the time kept working 
[135] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
with their hands. Mind and hands can 
work at the same time. How long and 
carefully Jesus had thought can be seen by 
the daring way in which he speaks when he 
comes out of his obscurity at the age of 
thirty. 

He has a message and he speaks it with- 
out a quaver or a hesitation. It is a message 
which is so strong and radical that it stirs 
the nation to the core. Even that great 
thinker, John the Baptist, fades away in the 
glory of this fresh thinker from the little 
shop in Nazareth. His sentences are as 
clear as crystal. Only men who have done 
much thinking are able to express them- 
selves with clearness. The reason there is 
mud in much that is said to-day is because 
men who write and speak are too hurried 
to think themselves out into clearness. His 
paragraphs are as beautiful as they are 
clear. His parables are gems. Not a 
[136] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

writer in nineteen centuries has been able 
to write parables equal to his. These 
parables were not made on the spur of the 
moment: some of them, I doubt not, took 
their shape in the carpenter shop in Naza- 
reth. His words carry with them a certain 
atmosphere which the sensitive soul can 
feel, and this atmosphere is the creation of 
a mind which is much given to meditation. 
There is a calmness and a restfulness in the 
words of Jesus given to them by a mind 
which has thought the problem through. 

In those silent years he had formed cer- 
tain convictions which went with him to 
the end. The difference between an idea 
and a conviction is that we hold the first 
while the second holds us. A conviction 
is an idea which has gotten such a grip 
upon us that it moulds and directs our life. 
In the silent years certain convictions took 
shape in Jesus — conceptions of God and 
[137] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

man, of right and duty, of this world and 
the next — which determined the character 
of his conduct and his teaching. And these 
convictions were not surrendered or even 
modified by the fierce opposition of the 
world. A pitiless storm beat upon his head 
all the way from Nazareth to Golgotha, but 
not one conviction melted down under the 
fury of the awful blast. The rain de- 
scended and the floods came, and the winds 
blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell 
not for it was founded upon a rock. 
Through the years of silence the deep 
foundations had been laid with fidelity and 
care, and nothing could overturn the struc- 
ture built upon them. 

He had built up a disposition which was 

*^ also incapable of destruction. The two 

tempers which strike us in the man Jesus 

is first his abhorrence of evil and secondly 

his love for human beings. How he hated 

[138] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
insincerity! Snobbery and foppery, pre- 
tense and putting-on, all shams and hum- 
bugs were odious to him. He struck them 
whenever he got a chance. And if more 
grown people nowadays had a deeper 
hatred for show and sham, there would be 
less humbugging than there is! And then 
he despised cruelty. Unkindness to a 
human being, especially if the man or 
woman was sick and forlorn or despised or 
poor, stirred his soul to blazing indignation. 
As a boy he had learned to hate hypocrisy, 
and to look upon every kind of cruelty 
with fiery detestation. 

Boys, if you do not hate evil when you 
are young, you are not likely to hate it 
when you are men. You will compromise 
with it and raise plausible excuses for it. 
His hatred of evil was matched by his burn- 
ing love for everything that was beautiful 
and good. He loved men. He pitied 
[139] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
them. He sympathized with them. He 
loved them with a love which even the 
meanest of men could not break down. No 
matter what men said about him or did 
against him, they could not turn him sour. 
He was sweet to the very center of his heart. 
When the soldiers drove the nails through 
his hands he said, " Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do." 

To put it all in a sentence, Jesus had in 
the silent years built up a character that is 
the wonder and admiration of the world. 
Inside that garden, surrounded by the hedge 
of silence, there had grown and blossomed 
in these hidden years a flower of paradise 
whose fragrance has filled all the world. 
In the dingy shop in little Nazareth there 
had been crystallized a character which to 
the end of time shall be the model and ideal 
of our race. And so, even though the New 
Testament does not tell us in so many words 
[ 140] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
what Jesus thought and said and did, in the 
thirty years which preceded his baptism in 
the river Jordan, we know substantially 
everything of value which took place, for 
the three years of recorded life are but the 
unfolding and interpretation of the years 
which were hidden. 

And what is the lesson for to-day? Boys 
and girls don't overlook yourselves. In the 
New Testament the big folks overlook the 
little folks. That is bad, but it is still worse 
for the little folks to overlook themselves. - 
Do not think for a moment that you are 
only getting ready to live; you are living 
now. Do not imagine you are getting 
ready to do some big thing later on. What 
is a big thing, the biggest thing which one 
can do in this world? Is it keeping a 
store, or making a lot of money, or arguing 
a case before a jury, or preaching a sermon, 
or publishing a paper, or making a book, 
[141 3 



THE SILENT YEARS 

or healing sick people? No, no, no; the 
biggest thing which any one can do in this 
world is to build up his soul, and that is 
what you are doing now. 

You are forming habits. Be careful not 
to form any which you will have to fight in 
your later years. Jesus never formed a 
habit which caused him trouble after thirty. 
Would to God we older people could all 
say that of ourselves. Many a man is 
harassed and tormented all his after life by 
habits formed before he was thirty. An 
evil habit is like a tiger lying at the door. 
Every now and then it springs, and the man 
must fight with it, losing time and strength 
and blood! 

Now is the time to let the convictions 
form which shall hold you through the 
storms of the sea. Thousands of men are 
like so much sea-weed, rising and falling 
with the tide, drifting with the current be- 
[ 142 ] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
cause they are without convictions. What 
is sea-weed worth in the making of a 
world? 

In these silent years certain dispositions 
are taking shape which will color all the 
years which are to come. Many a man and 
woman here this morning is unhappy, los- 
ing out of life the best things which life 
has to give, all because in the silent 5^ears 
dispositions were allowed to grow which 
were contrary to the mind of Jesus. 

These are the years in which you are to 
decide what you are going to do. Now is 
the time to frame your plan. Jesus had his 
plan completed at the age of thirty. From 
the hour of his baptism onward he never 
wavered, hesitated, or doubled back upon 
his track. Men tried their best to hasten 
him, retard him, or turn him aside, but 
every time he pushed steadily forward say- 
ing — "I must!" He accomplished much 
[143] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
because he lost no time in retracing his 
steps. The men who have no plan are the 
men who march bravely up a hill and then 
march down again. They go forward for 
a mile, and retrace their course because 
their purpose is uncertain. They go in a 
roundabout way, losing strength and time, 
when they could have cut across lots, had 
they carried in their eye a goal. 

If you want to quadruple the length of 
your life decide early what you are going 
to do. A plan is the greatest of time-savers. 
The public life of Jesus was only three 
years long, but so much was accomplished 
that we forget how short it was. When we 
hear the name of Methuselah we think how 
long he lived; there is nothing else to think 
about. But when we hear the name of 
Jesus we do not think of the number of his 
years, but of the mighty work which he ac- 
complished. Every stroke counted, every 
[ 144 ] 



THE SILENT YEARS 

word told, every effort deepened the im- 
pression, and widened the influence, so that 
at the end of his brief life he could say: " I 
have finished the work which thou gavest 
me to do.'' 

In the silent years the roots of the soul 
established themselves in the soil. Some 
men are always surprising us ; they do better 
than we thought they would, because they 
were better rooted than we knew. Other 
men are always disappointing us. They 
never come up to expectations, because in 
the silent years the growth of the roots was 
interfered with and stunted. The little oak 
is scarcely noticed standing among the 
beeches and birches and poplars and pines. 
Through ten and twenty years it goes on 
growing, but its progress is silent and its 
glory is hidden. But slowly through the 
century, while its neighbors fall and perish, 
it rises and spreads until every traveler who 
[145] 



THE SILENT YEARS 
passes that way stops and exclaims : " What 
a magnificent tree!" 

Boys and girls, I urge you to remem- 
ber this: — The so-called unrecorded years 
are every one recorded, the silent years will 
some day surely speak, and everything 
which is hidden will some time, if not here 
then yonder, burst upon the eyes of men and 
of God 1 



1146] 



VII 
WORK 



Is not this the carpenter ? " 

Mark 6: 3. 

Preached Sunday Morning 
May 13, 1906 



^ 



^^■^^ 



Z=^4i. 




W^ 



^^^ 



S^% 



WORK 

THEY were looking at Jesus when 
they asked the question. The ques- 
tion was asked by some people in 
Nazareth. Jesus has been speaking in the 
synagogue. He has taken a piece of Scrip- 
ture and unfolded it and explained it and 
illustrated it, and gotten light out of it, 
and the people of Nazareth are astonished. 
They begin to ask questions : " Is not this 
the carpenter? the son of Mary and brother 
of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? 
and are not his sisters here with us? And 
they were ofifended in him." They do not 
like him. They shut their hearts against 
him. They refuse to listen to him and to 
do the things w^hich he says. 

'' Is not this the carpenter?" This is an 
illuminating question. It throws light, and 
[ 149] 



WORK 

it throws the light in two directions. When 
you hold up a lamp or lantern in order to 
see the face of some one approaching you 
in the dark, you light up, not only the face 
of the person approaching you, but you 
light up your own face as well. When 
these people ask the question, ^' Is not this 
the carpenter? " they light up their own 
faces and also the face of Jesus. 

The question shows us that these men in 
Nazareth thought that one can account for 
a man simply by knowing his parents and 
brothers and sisters. There was nothing 
wonderful in Joseph nor anything extraor- 
dinary in Mary, and therefore there could 
be nothing great in Jesus! But in reason- 
ing thus these people were mistaken. There 
was nothing wonderful about the parents 
of Mohammed, or of Luther, or of Goethe, 
or of Shakespeare. You cannot tell what a 
man is simply by knowing what his parents 
[150] 



WORK 

were. God has something to do with the 
making of a man. These people in Naza- 
reth supposed that under equal circum- 
stances characters must be equal. They 
adopted the principle that one child must 
be as bright as another, and that one boy 
must be as good as another if they grow up 
in the same home. All of which is of 
course an error. These people overesti- 
mated the importance of circumstances and 
forgot that God has something to do with 
the making of a man. Their great mis- 
take was that they left out God. 

Their question would further indicate 
that in their judgment a man could not 
know much who never went away to school. 
Jesus had never gone to college in Jeru- 
salem, he had not even attended the High 
School in Capernaum. He had had no ad- 
vantages other than those afforded him in 
the humble school in Nazareth. It was 
[151] 



WORK 

preposterous, so they thought, that a man 
who had never been to college should be 
able to instruct others — and here again they 
were wrong. It is not necessary for every 
man to go to school in order to be wise. 
Charlema'gne was one of the greatest men 
that ever lived, but he could not sign his 
own name. God, as well as a school, has 
something to do with the making of a man, 
and these people in Nazareth left out God. 
These men in Nazareth also took it for 
granted that a mechanic has no right to talk 
to his fellowmen about the high and deep 
things of the soul. Is not this the car- 
penter? the artisan, the mechanic, the 
manual laborer? What right has he to 
claim to know things about God and the 
soul, duty and eternity, which other men do 
not know? And so they were offended in 
him. They were indignant at him because 
he explained to them the Scriptures. 
[152] 



WORK 

And thus we see that these people in 
Nazareth were narrow and shallow and 
foolish and mistaken, but let us not be too 
hard on them, for they were not much dif- 
ferent from us. Some of us have some- 
times felt that if we had only lived in Pales- 
tine when Jesus lived and taught, we 
should certainly have become his disciples, 
and found it easy to do his bidding. In 
thinking thus, however, we are mistaken. 
It is much easier to believe in Jesus at the 
distance of 1900 years than it would have 
been had we been permitted to hear him 
teach in Nazareth and Capernaum. The 
fact that he was a carpenter would have 
offended us very much. There are certain 
people who have a right to teach us, and 
when they speak we gladly listen. We 
look up to college presidents, and college 
professors, and editors, and statesmen, and 
generals and poets, and philosophers and 
[153] 



WORK 

scientists, but which one of us would be 
willing to listen to a mechanic, especially if 
he should set himself up as one better fitted 
than anybody else to tell us who God is and 
how best the soul can come into harmony 
with him? Not one of us would have be- 
lieved in Jesus had we lived in Palestine 
nineteen centuries ago. 

But it is with Jesus and not with these 
questioning villagers that we are concerned 
to-day. Upon the face of Jesus this ques- 
tion throws a wondrous light. It reveals 
something nowhere else revealed in all the 
Scriptures. There is not a sentence in the 
Old Testament that even intimates that the 
Messiah of the world would be a carpenter. 
There is not a sentence in Matthew, Luke 
or John, or in any of the letters of St. Paul, 
which tells us that Jesus was a carpenter. 
There is only one sentence in all the Bible 
that tells us this interesting fact, and that 
[154] 



WORK 

sentence is the sentence which I have chosen 
for my text. I have taken it for my text 
because I feared that some of you might not 
see it. 

The fact is, many people read the Scrip- 
tures and miss this sentence altogether. 
They see that Jesus is a prophet and a priest 
and a king, but they do not see that he is a 
carpenter. They glory in the fact that he 
is the teacher, the physician and the good 
shepherd, but they find no joy in the fact 
that he is the carpenter. If you should 
make out this afternoon a list of all the 
names by which Jesus is known in the 
Scriptures you would write down the Lily 
of the Valley, the Bright and Morning 
Star, the Alpha and Omega, the Rock, the 
Way, the Truth, the Life, the Door, the 
Living Water, the Bread of Heaven, but 
your list would not be complete if you did 
not head it with the '' Carpenter." 
[155] 



WORK 

Even learned men who have given their 
lives to the study of the Scriptures have not 
gotten their eyes upon my text. Not long 
ago I looked through a large number of 
" Lives of Jesus," written by some of the 
greatest scholars of the last hundred years, 
and I discovered that while they had many 
things to say about the birth of Jesus, and 
about his appearance in the Temple at the 
age of twelve, they almost all passed at once 
from his visit to Jerusalem to his appear- 
ance at the Jordan to be baptized of John. 
O, learned men who write the life of the 
Son of God, you ought not to forget to tell 
us that he was a carpenter! 

If the scholars overlook my text it is not 
surprising that so many members of the 
church never find it. Most Christians 
when they think of Jesus think of him as 
working miracles, or preaching mighty ser- 
mons, or dying on the cross. The glory of 
[156] 



WORK 

the three years of his public life dazzles the 
eyes and makes all the preceding years seem 
dark. But certainly it is not wise to pass 
over eighteen years of Jesus' earthly career 
without a thought. If he became a man at 
twelve and died at thirty-three his adult 
life covered twenty-one years. Of this 
period six-sevenths was spent in a carpen- 
ter's shop, and one seventh was spent in 
teaching. What right have we to ignore 
six-sevenths of Jesus' mature life? When 
Jesus at the age of twelve said, "Wist ye 
not that I must be about my Father's busi- 
ness?" he passed at once into the carpen- 
ter's shop at Nazareth, where he worked 
for eighteen years. 

Through all that period he was about his 
Father's business, and certainly there are 
lessons in that business for us every one. 
We lose much comfort by going so seldom 
back to Nazareth. We like to think that 
[157] 



WORK 

Jesus is our pattern and example, but some- 
times the pattern seems so glorious and the 
example so lofty that we cannot follow it. 
Why not go back to Nazareth and see the 
life which Jesus lived before he became a 
teacher? In those eighteen years, so far as 
we are told, he did nothing wonderful, said 
nothing marvelous. He lived a quiet, 
uneventful, humdrum life — just such a life 
as the most of us must always live. He 
worked at his humble trade, earning money 
with which to buy bread and meat and 
clothes. 

In those years it was necessary for him to 
pay the taxes and repair the roof and to 
make the garden and to do a thousand other 
insignificant and trifling things which 
make up the bulk of ordinary life. Year 
after year he followed the routine round of 
prosaic duty, simply content to be about his 
Father's business. When, therefore, you 
[158] 



WORK 

feel that your life amounts to little, when 
the world grows gray and your task loses its 
sparkle, do not become discouraged, but 
looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher 
of your faith, say to yourself : " This is the 
carpenter." 

Is not this the carpenter? the mechanic? 
the workman? Let us think of him this 
morning as a worker, not a brain worker, 
nor a heart worker, but simply a manual 
laborer. All the wise books which I have 
ever read agree in praising work. They all 
unite in condemning idleness. In all of 
them sloth is a cardinal sin. AH sorts of 
harsh and ugly things are said about the 
idler. 

Only the other day I noticed that Mr. 
John Burroughs, one of the wisest old men 
now alive, declares that " the all important 
thing is not health, money, friends, fame, 
power, knowledge, rest, but the best thing 
[159] 



WORK . 

for a man is that which keeps the currents 
going. The secret of happiness is something 
to do." That is the way wise men have 
been talking from the beginning. But not- 
withstanding all the eulogies which wise 
men have pronounced upon labor, a surpris- 
ingly large number of people do not like to 
work. Some will not work at all. They 
would rather steal than work. They are 
loafers and shirks and parasites. Some pre- 
tend to work and go through the motions of 
working when they are not working at all. 
It is easy for a boy to keep the text book 
open before him while his mind is down in 
the street playing. A lot of grown people 
pretend to work just in that way. There 
are many persons who, while they are will- 
ing to do things which are in their opinion 
up to the level of their dignity, have a great 
contempt for manual labor. Working 
with one's hands is something, so they think, 
[i6o] 



WORK 

low and menial and almost disgraceful. 
Such people speak of the laboring classes 
with a sneer on their lip. They talk of 
laboring men as though laboring men were 
hardly human at all. Did you never hear 
finely dressed ladies speaking of working 
girls as though working girls belong almost 
to a disgraced and disreputable class? It 
IS a good thing for every person who wants 
to be a Christian to sit down with the Bible 
and try to find out just what God thinks 
of work. 

There is no doubt as to what the Hebrews 
thought of it from the very beginning of 
their history. The Old Testament Scrip- 
tures dignify toil, eulogize it, glorify it, 
crown it with many crowns. The prophets, 
one after another, pour upon idleness the 
vials of their wrath and their scorn. 
Many hard things may be said about the 
Jew, but nobody can rightfully accuse him 
[ i6i ] 



WORK 

of laziness. Wherever you find him he is 
up early in the morning and stays up late 
at night, and the only men who can suc- 
cessfully compete with him in any field of 
activity are men who are willing to do a 
prodigious amount of labor. It was cus- 
tomary among the Hebrews for every^oy 
to learn a trade. 

The Hebrews were not afraid to work 
with their hands. Jesus himself learned 
the trade of Joseph. Year after year he 
worked in the carpenter shop at Nazareth. 
Those wonderful hands of his, with which 
he touched the eyes of the blind and cooled 
the fevered brow of the sick and brought 
healing to the flesh of the leper, were 
the hands of a mechanic who had toiled 
year after year in an obscure little shop 
making things that were useful in men's 
homes. 

Probably all of Jesus' apostles were 
[162] 



WORK 

manual laborers except Matthew. We 
are told expressly that Paul, the greatest 
of them all, earned his living by working 
with his hands. Again and again in his 
letters Paul calls attention to the fact that 
he has earned his own living by manual 
labor. He was not ashamed of it either. 
He seems to have been proud of his hands 
because the haircloth had blackened them 
and the thread had left its marks on them. 
Listen to him as he says to the elders of 
Ephesus, who met him down on the sea 
coast at Miletus: ^'Ye yourselves know 
that these hands have ministered unto my 
necessities and to them that were with me." 
The sight of his hands drew them to him 
and made them love him all the more. 
After he had prayed with them they fell 
on his neck and kissed him — strong men 
sobbing because they were to see his face 
no more. These are two facts, then, never 
[163] 



WORK 

to be forgotten, that Jesus, the founder of 
the Christian religion, was a manual la- 
borer, and the pierced hands into which he 
will gather the lives of nations and men 
are hands that have been disciplined by 
toil. Paul, the apostle, who did more for 
Christianity than any other man who has 
ever lived, also was a manual laborer, and 
the hands with which he grips the heart 
strings of the world are hands that have 
been stained by toil. 

If you want, therefore, to be a Christian 
you cannot despise the laboring classes. 
If you wish to follow Jesus you can never 
speak contemptuously of manual labor. 
The man who feels scorn or contempt for 
the hand workers of the world is nothing 
but a snob or a perfumed barbarian, even 
though he wears a high silk hat and gets his 
boots blacked by the boot-black every 
morning! 

[164] 



WORK 

These, then, are the lessons for to-day. 
Make up your mind that you are going to 
be workers. There are many things 
which you cannot do, but there is one thing 
which everybody can do, and that is work. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson used to get great 
comfort out of this fact. He said that if 
people told him that he had no genius then 
he would work the harder; that if they 
told him he had no virtue that he would 
then go home and work still the harder. 
Flee idleness as one of the most dangerous 
of all sins. Count it a disgrace to be lazy. 
Pity no man so much as the man who has 
nothing to do. If you want to be healthy, 
if you want to be happy, if you want to be 
useful, then you must work. 

Never be ashamed to work with your 

hands. Many of you will never be called 

to do this, but should that be your calling, 

do not shirk it or be ashamed of it. In 

[165] 



WORK 

one of Jesus' parables there is a man who 
says: "I cannot dig." He was a great 
cheat. He was lying when he said he 
could not dig. It would have been far 
better for him to dig than to do the things 
which he had been doing and the thing 
which he proposed to do. Many men 
would be far better of? if they were dig- 
ging to-day. 

Boys sometimes get the idea that they 
are disgraced if they do not enter one of 
the professions. The result is that some 
of the professions are greatly overcrowded 
and other fields of activity are crying for 
men. A lot of young men are starving in 
the professions who would have made a 
good living if they had only been willing to 
dig. Digging hurts no one, nor is it ever 
a disgrace. 

Marcus Aurelius was, according to all 
good judges, one of the wisest men who 
[i66] 



WORK 

have ever lived. In thinking over his life 
he said he had enjoyed three supreme ad- 
vantages. As a youth he had been taught 
to endure hardness, to work with his hands^ 
and to mind his own business. Fortunate 
is the boy who like Marcus Aurelius has 
been taught early to work with his hands. 
Nor should the girls be overlooked at 
this point, for girls as well as boys should 
be trained to do things with their hands. 
It hurts no girl to work in the kitchen or 
to do the various kinds of work which 
must be done in a house. One of the rea- 
sons why the servant problem has become 
so baffling in America is because there has 
been too much of the old barbarian spirit 
in our American families, which looks 
down on housework as something degrad- 
ing, and upon servants as an inferior class 
of creatures. Many an American girl has 
been brought up to speak impudently or 
[167] 



WORK 

disrespectfully to the servants, and to 
imagine that her accomplishments were 
complete if she could paint a little or play 
upon the piano. Whenever the girl at the 
piano has nothing but contempt for the 
girl who washes the dishes, the girl who 
washes the dishes will have nothing but 
envy for the girl who plays the piano. 
With envy and contempt everything is 
spoiled. 

No human being is to be scorned be- 
cause he or she is a servant. The word 
servant is a beautiful word. Christ has 
redeemed it. He has told us that all his 
followers must call themselves servants. 
'^ It is enough for the disciple that he be 
as his Master, and the servant as his Lord." 
If any one of us wishes to be really great 
then he must become the servant of all. It 
is not necessary that all girls should work 
in the kitchen or that all girls should give 
[ i68 ] 



WORK 

the bulk of their time to doing the work 
of the house, but every American girl 
ought to be trained to do three things: 
sew a seam beautifully, cook a beefsteak 
superbly, and bake a perfect loaf of bread. 
If a girl has not learned how to do these 
three things before she is twenty she has 
not been properly trained. 

In certain royal families in Europe all 
the boys are taught trades and the girls 
are trained to do housework. The world 
has never had a grander queen than Queen 
Victoria, or one more universally loved, 
and it was one of the crowning glories of 
Queen Victoria that when a girl she had 
been carefully trained to do the work of 
the house, and that she brought up all her 
daughters in the same sensible and Chris- 
tian way. 

Never look down on those who are 
called to work with their hands. Hand 
[169] 



WORK 

work is necessary and therefore it is honor- 
able; it is ordained of God and therefore 
let no man despise it. But it is not the 
only necessary work in the world. Brain 
work is also necessary. Hand workers 
often forget this. They speak oftentimes 
as though they were the only workers in 
the world, as though men who did not 
work with their hands are only loafers and 
idlers. 

The fact is, brain workers are just as 
essential to this world as hand workers. 
The world cannot get on without either 
class. In the building of this church the 
work was not all done by men who wore 
overalls and whose garments were bespat- 
tered with mortar. There was an im- 
mense amount of brain work done before 
the walls went up or even the foundations 
were laid. The roof was put up by the 
brain before it was put up by the hands, 
[170] 



WORK 

and all sorts of interesting mathematical 
computations and calculations were made 
before the great tower finally rose into the 
air. 

Let no hand worker despise the man 
who works with his brain, and let no brain 
worker despise the man who works with 
his hands. Manual labor is essential to 
civilization. Suppose there were no one 
willing to wash the windows, and suppose 
there were no one willing to scrub the 
floors. Think of the work of setting the 
tables for four millions of people in this 
city every day, and think of all the 
drudgery of the cooking and the washing 
of dishes necessary for so great a feast. 
Honor to the men and women who do this 
great work. Hand workers are not to be 
despised, moreover, because even though 
they work with their hands they may still 
be using their minds. 

[171] 



WORK 

Some of the sanest and best thinking of 
the world is done by men who work with 
their hands, and some of the most morbid 
and crazy thinking which is done is done 
by men who spend their lives among their 
books. Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
in "Aurora Leigh" tells how day after 
day she worked upon her lace with her 
needle, but even while her fingers were 
working with the needle she says, " My 
soul was singing at a work apart behind 
the wall of sense." 

What do you suppose Paul was doing 
when he was making tents out of the goat 
haircloth? He was working out, no 
doubt, some of those .great ideas which 
will burn in the firmament of thought like 
fixed stars forever. While he was sewing 
a seam he was also thinking of him who 
although being in the form of God made 
himself of no reputation, and took upon 
[172] 



WORK 

him the form of a sen^ant and was found 
in the fashion of a man. I suspect the 
best things in Paul's letters were all 
worked out when he was working with his 
hands. 

And who knows but that Jesus may have 
done some of his greatest intellectual work 
in the carpenter shop at Nazareth? All 
the critics say that his language is fault- 
less, his parables are gems unsurpassed and 
unsurpassable. Do you suppose he spoke 
those lovely things on the spur of the mo- 
ment? I do not. When you see a beau- 
tiful picture you know that some artist has 
Vv^orked long upon it. When you hear an 
exquisite song you know that the singer 
has given to it abundant toil. When you 
hear language that is chaste and fine and 
forceful you may rest assured that the per- 
son who speaks the language has given 
days and nights to the conquest of his ad- 
[173] 



WORK 

jectives and adverbs, and to the perfecting 
of that high and diiBcult art of weaving 
words into a texture which shall allure and 
captivate the minds and hearts of men. 

When his fellow-townsmen said, 
"Whence hath this man all these things?" 
Jesus might, I think, have made this an- 
swer: "I got them in the carpenter 
shop.'' Not only may hand-workers be 
sound thinkers, but they may also be men 
and women of quality. Quality never de- 
pends on clothes, or rank, or station; it is a 
matter of the heart only. Who is a man 
of quality? The so-called gentleman who 
moves in the highest circles and who is 
selfish, coarse, boorish, brutal — or the man 
who wears the mechanic's garb and who 
beneath his coarse coat has a heart that is 
sympathetic and tender? 

Persons of quality, who are they? They 
are people who exercise self-denial and 
[174] 



WORK 

self-control and self-sacrifice, and they are 
found just as frequently in the cottage as 
they are found in the palace. Some of the 
gentlest and sweetest and wisest and great- 
est and loftiest souls in the world are to be 
found in humble and obscure places doing 
work which wins no applause, and only 
the 'most meager rewards. Jesus was a 
man of quality. He was earth's finest gen- 
tleman. As Ruskin has pointed out — A 
gentleman has two characteristics: he is 
sensitive and sympathetic. And where 
will you find feeling more sensitive or 
more sympathetic than in the simple car- 
penter of Nazareth? 

In the Louvre in Paris there is a famous 
painting by Murillo. It is entitled, " The 
Miracle of San Diego.'' A door opens 
and two noblemen and a priest enter a 
kitchen. They are amazed to find that all 
the kitchen maids are angels. One is 
[175] 



WORK 

handling a watering pot, another a joint of 
meat, a third a basket of vegetables, a 
fourth is tending the fire. The thought of 
the artist is that it is in toil and drudgery 
we develop qualities which are celestial. 



[176] 



VIII 
THE WILL 

I will." Mark i : 41. 

Preached Sunday Morning 

May 12, J907 



THE WILL 

THE first glimpse which we catch of 
Jesus as a man is that which we 
get of him at the river Jordan on 
the day on which he was baptized. 
A great preacher has appeared at the 
Jordan, calling on men to turn away from 
their sins. He urges them to show their 
desire to do God's will by submitting to 
the ceremony of baptism. His voice has 
something in it which smites and pierces, 
and many, obedient to his word, are bap- 
tized. All sorts of men come, rich and 
poor, high and low, young and old, good 
and bad, fishermen and farmers, sailors 
and soldiers, shepherds and merchants, 
masons and vineyard dressers, publicans 
and common laborers, and not one of them 
[179] 



THE WILL 
IS turned away. The exhortation is for all, 
and whoever comes is received. 

But all at once something happens. 
The procession is halted. The work of 
baptizing ceases. Every one stands as- 
tounded. A man has appeared whom the 
great preacher will not baptize. "No, 
no," he says, " I cannot do it, it is not fit- 
ting that I should do it, I must decline to 
do it, for I am the one who ought to be 
baptized by you!" But the stranger, 
brushing aside all the arguments and pro- 
testations of the preacher, quietly insists 
on being dealt with as the other men have 
been, and the stalwart, iron-willed 
preacher speedily succumbs. Here is a 
man against whom he cannot stand. 
Shaken from his resolution he proceeds to 
do what the stranger says he ought to do, 
and thus it was that Jesus of Nazareth en- 
tered upon his public career. It is worth 
[i8o] 



THE WILL 

while remembering that the first sunbeam 
which falls upon the man Jesus reveals to 
us in him the trait of steadfastness, or 
tenacious resolution. At the very start he 
meets with opposition; the opposition 
melts and the man of Galilee is allowed to 
have his way. 

In the first hour we are in the presence 
of a man of firm decision, and the impres- 
sion of the first hour is deepened as we pro- 
ceed. Let us think then this morning about 
the Will, and you may mark as the text just 
two words recorded in the forty-first verse 
of the first chapter of the Gospel according 
to St. Mark, " I will.'' 

The life of Jesus was lived from first to 
last in the teeth of great and increasing op- 
position. He was obliged to fight his way 
step by step. Obstacles were piled up be- 
fore Him, and the world conspired to beat 
Him back or drive Him from His course. 
[i8i] 



THE WILL 

As a teacHer He was resisted at every point. 
Men did not want Him to say the things He 
liked to say, but He kept on saying them, no 
matter how men hissed and cursed Him. 
As a physician He was opposed by men 
who were determined that He should not 
heal on the Sabbath and that He should not 
show mercy to lepers who were Samaritans. 
But He went right on doing the things for 
which He was hated and denounced. As a 
member of society He left undone things 
which people insisted on Him doing and 
did many things which brought down upon 
Him the scorn of the best people in the 
town. 

For instance, all the best and most in- 
fluential people said: "Do not associate 
with these publicans, do not go near them, 
or speak kindly to them." And His answer 
was, "I will!" Men tried to sidetrack 
Him in his teaching, but he went on as 
[182] 



THE WILL 

though he did not see them. A learned 
man, Nicodemus, came to Him with prob- 
lems which were uppermost in Nicodemus' 
mind, and Jesus compelled the learned man 
to talk about the things which were upper- 
most in Jesus' mind. An ignorant woman 
in Samaria tried to interest Him in discus- 
sions which were interesting to Samari- 
tans, but he compelled her to think of the 
things which were interesting to Him. 

A man once interrupted Him in a sermon, 
demanding that attention be given to some 
tangle involving property, but He went 
right on talking of the high things of the 
Spirit and compelled the interrupter to go 
along with Him. No matter who it was 
with whom He spoke He constrained that 
person to go with Him. 

If His enemies could not move Him, and 
if strangers could not change Him, neither 
could His relations and friends. His 
[ 183 ] 



THE WILL 

brothers had their plans for Him, but He 
refused steadfastly to adopt them. They 
wanted Him to go to Jerusalem and show 
the big people there what a wonderful man 
He was, but He refused to go. On a cer- 
tain occasion His brothers, alarmed by His 
burning zeal and incessant labor, wanted to 
take Him back to Nazareth, but He 
thwarted all their efforts. 

He loved His disciples, but He constantly 
resisted them. He was fond of His friends 
but they could not swerve Him from His 
path. Martha and Mary wanted Him to 
come to Bethany, but He went on working 
where He was, and did not go until the 
right hour had come. Peter tried to per- 
suade Him not to go to Jerusalem, but 
Jesus thrust him aside and went. The 
crowd had its ambitions and aspirations, 
and tried to sweep Jesus along in the cur- 
rent of its feeling, but He disappointed the 
[184] 



THE WILL 

crowd and proceeded along a course which 
He himself had chosen. 

All the forces of the world massed them- 
selves against Him, but He could not be 
checked or disconcerted. He was subjected 
to the fires of hate, but He was not melted. 
He was exposed to the fires of love, but He 
did not yield. The Pharisees, the most 
learned people of their day, laid hold on 
Him and pulled at Him, but they could not 
bend Him; the Sadducees, the richest peo- 
ple of the time, pulled at Him, but they 
could not bend Him. The Herodians, an 
influential political party of that age, 
grasped him and pulled at Him, but He 
remained inflexible and unconquerable. 
Winds blew a hurricane across the land, but 
He never swayed or wavered. Storms 
rushed down upon Him from the ravines 
of prejudice and out of the caves of hate, 
but He was never shaken or made to totter. 
[185] 



THE WILL 

Palestine became an ocean and the huge bil- 
lows dashed against Him, each billow 
shouting, "You shall not preach your 
gospel, you shall not do your work!" and 
His reply was — " I will!'' 

It is this unwavering tenacity of purpose, 
this unswerving persistency in conduct, this 
unfaltering resoluteness, this unflinching 
determination, this indomitable self-posses- 
sion and mastery which awes and thrills 
every one who comes into Jesus' presence. 
He was a man of tremendous and unparal- 
leled force of will. 

Firm and immovable Himself He loved 
this will-power in others. His admiration 
of John the Baptist was keen and high, de- 
claring that no greater man had ever been 
born of woman. One can see the cause of 
this admiration in a question which he one 
day propounded to a crowd: "Whom 
went ye out to see? A reed shaken with the 
[i86] 



THE WILL 

wind? " It was a vivid picture, for reeds 
grew up and down the Jordan valley and 
along all the little streams which tumbled 
into the Dead Sea. They were tall and 
slender, sometimes even ten and fifteen feet 
in height, and so thin and fragile were they 
that they swayed to and fro in every wind 
that blew. " Did you go out to see a reed 
shaken v/ith the wind?" 

If you could have heard Him say it you 
would have felt the heat of His scorn for a 
fluctuating man, and you would have 
caught His answer in the very tone in which 
He asked the question. John was not a 
bending reed, but a man inflexible as the 
everlasting laws of God. It was because of 
this that Jesus loved him, and for this rea- 
son He loved also Simon Peter. When one 
day Jesus asked his disciples who people 
supposed He was, Peter proceeded to give 
the variety of opinions which were in men's 
[187] 



THE WILL 

mouths, and then went on to say, " But all 
these opinions have no influence on Me! It 
does not matter what the Pharisees or the 
Scribes or the Sadducees or the members of 
the Sanhedrin have to say, I stand by my 
first convicition, I still cling to my earliest 
vision, I say you are the Messiah, the Son 
of the living God." 

And Jesus, delighted with this steadfast- 
ness in a world swept by hurricanes, said: 
"You are well named, Peter, you are in- 
deed a Rock, and upon this kind of rock I 
will build my church." It would seem, 
then, that the first essential in the building 
of a man and the one thing indispensable in 
the building of a church is a steadfast 
resoluteness, an energizing and a persistent 
will. 

I fear that the importance of the will has 
been too much neglected in all our systems 
of education. In the public schools and in 
[i88] 



THE WILL 

the colleges and universities, and also in 
our churches, undue emphasis has been 
placed on other faculties, while the will has 
been slighted or completely overlooked. It 
has been a fashion too often followed, to 
make the memory the queen of all our 
mental powers. Pupils have been ranked 
according to their memory, and he has 
been counted the most worthy member of 
the school who has had the faculty of recit- 
ing the largest number of dates, formulas 
and facts. This delusion that memory is 
supreme and all important follows many 
persons all through life. 

There are numerous systems of memory 
training, and men and women work like 
galley slaves in their ambition to perfect 
themselves in the art of not forgetting. No 
wail is more disconsolate or frequent than 
*^My memory is wretched — I cannot re- 
member — I have no memory at all!" Yet 
[189] 



THE WILL 

memory is only one of the subordinate fac- 
ulties of the mind. It occupies an honor- 
able but humbfe room. It is a convenient 
and profitable servant, but it is one which 
we lose easily and the one which earliest de- 
cays. The highest happiness does not de- 
pend upon it, nor is the destiny of the soul 
determined by it. If half the attention 
which has been given to the cultivation of 
the memory had been devoted to the disci- 
pline of the will, the world would not be 
what it is. 

There are others who are always extolling 
the imagination. It is, they claim, the 
queen of the faculties. Upon its develop- 
ment our happiness and usefulness in large 
measure depend. Many volumes have been 
written on the training of the imagination, 
and schemes have been carefully worked 
out by which it may be built up and en- 
riched. But while much that has been thus 
[190] 



THE WILL 

written is true, and while work expended in 
this direction is both pleasant and profit- 
able, nevertheless the imagination is not 
the supreme power of the soul, and a man 
may be able to soar on the wings of fancy 
into the highest heavens, and still live a life 
that is mean and contemptible, and end his 
career in heartbreak and gloom. 

And so there are those who have no con- 
fidence either in the memory or in the 
imagination. They say, cultivate memory 
and you have parrots, cultivate the im- 
agination and you have dreamers, let us 
then cultivate the reason and all will be 
well. Let us teach boys and girls to think, 
to judge, to draw conclusions. Away with 
your memorizing and your soaring, and let 
us have more logic, let us learn how to draw 
conclusions from premises, and how to 
make distinctions between things that are 
not at all the same. Boys and girls if taught 
[ 191 ] 



THE WILL 

to think will most certainly become kings 
and queens in the world! 

Now it goes without saying that boys and 
girls ought to exercise their memory, their 
imagination and their reason, but it should 
never be forgotten that there is one faculty 
which is higher than all these, and that is 
the will. These other faculties are only 
pages or attendants, or, if you please, cour- 
tiers, arrayed in spangled garments; but if 
you will look over their heads toward the 
power seated on the throne, you will see 
that the king is the will. Around him are 
gathered the dispositions and inclinations, 
the appetites and passions and emotions, the 
opinions and notions and desires and ambi- 
tions and yearnings and longings and aspi- 
rations and hopes and fears and loves and 
hates. All these bow down before the will. 
It is the will which judges, decides, prefers, 
chooses. It is the will which issues decrees 
[ 192 ] 



THE WILL 

and lays down laws and moulds life accord- 
ing to his own good pleasure. At the very 
center of the soul sits the will. He listens 
to what the emotions say, and the appetites 
clamor for, and the passions desire, and 
having weighed the arguments and sifted 
the reasons he gives his decision. He is the 
arbiter and maker of life. 

The happiness of life depends on the 
will. Everyone wants happiness, but not 
everybody knows how happiness can be 
found. There is an impression that it de- 
pends on the possession of things. If this 
be true how does it happen that thousands 
of the most miserable people on earth have 
everything that money can buy? One can 
be weighed down with good things and still 
sigh "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" 
Nor does happiness depend on the things 
which you know. It was once supposed 
that knowledge is the source of joy, and that 
[ 193 ] 



THE WILL 

if men were only educated and had their 
minds stored with the treasures of learning, 
then the shadows would vanish and music 
would fill all the days. But experience 
proves that knowledge has little to do with 
the joy of the heart, and that some of the 
most wretched of men are those who have 
mastered many a kingdom of learning. The 
secret of happiness does not lie in the things 
we have or in the things we know. 

The secret of success lies in the will. 
There are two great surprises in the world 
— some men come out so much better than 
we expected, others come out so much 
worse. The reason why we are surprised 
and disappointed is because we assume that 
the secret of success lies in other things and 
not in the will. If a boy has a good memory 
and gets high grades at school, we expect 
great things of him. How absurd! If a 
young man is brilliant, if he has an imagi- 
[194] 



THE WILL 

nation which flashes and an intellect which 
fascinates, we dream high things for him. 
This is foolish! In the school the boy of 
memory may shine, and in the parlor the 
young man of imagination may sparkle, but 
on that dusty and difficult road which runs 
out across the years, it is not the man of 
imagination or memory, but the man of 
tenacious and unconquerable will who wins 
the victories and secures the crown. 

What is success but the overcoming of 
obstacles, and how are obstacles to be over- 
come? Not by memory and not by imagi- 
nation and not by reason, but by the forth- 
putting of the power of the will. There is 
a world of wisdom concentrated in the old 
proverb: ^' Where there's a will there's a 
way." 

Character and destiny depend on the 
will. We do not differ so much from one 
another as we sometimes imagine, either in 
[195] 



THE WILL 

feelings or ideas, in ambitions or ideals. 
The chief difference in men is a difference 
in the will. Men of the same family living 
under the same conditions will come out at 
entirely different points, because of a dif- 
ference in the use of the will. Character 
is not something that drifts in on us like sea- 
weed. It is a continent which is built up by 
numberless acts of the will. Cicero was 
right when he said : " To live is not to 
think, to live is to will." How can you ac- 
count for the fact that so many of the human 
wrecks which find their way to the mission 
stations and places of refuge in our large 
cities are from good homes and great uni- 
versities, men who have had all the luxuries 
and all the advantages, and yet have made 
shipwreck at last? There is only one expla- 
nation, and that is that the secret of happi- 
ness, of success, of character, and of destiny 
lies in the will. 

[196] 



THE WILL 

If this be true then certainly we ought to 
cultivate our will. No other part of our 
human nature can be so strengthened by 
exercise, and no other faculty if neglected 
can bring such misery on a man, as the will. 
Everybody nowadays believes in the exer- 
cise of the body. It is strange that every- 
body does not believe in the culture of the 
the will. Let me give you three suggestions 
on this point. 

Train your will to act promptly in decid- 
ing all questions of conduct, when you see 
clearly which act is right and which act is 
wrong. When you see that one course is 
right and the other course is wrong, your de- 
cision ought to be as quick as a flash of 
lightning. You cannot afford to parley, or 
dally, or procrastinate a single moment. If 
you say I know this course is right and I am 
sure the other course is wrong, but I shall 
not decide till to-morrow which course I 
[ 197 ] 



THE WILL 
shall pursue, you are putting a knife into 
one of the arteries of your soul, and you will 
so weaken yourself that by and by you can- 
not tell which course is right and which 
course is wrong. The boy or girl who hesi- 
tates in deciding that he will follow the path 
of life, has already entered on the way that 
leads to death. 

Train your will to hold on. When you 
have made a plan, carry it out. When you 
have decided to do a thing, do it. Do not 
let anything inconvenient or disagreeable 
daunt you or drive you back. Wordsworth 
having decided to take a mountain walk 
would not turn back when it threatened to 
rain, because he would not surrender to so 
small a thing as a shower. A rain was dis- 
agreeable to the skin, but the act of giving 
up a fixed purpose in view of a slight pos- 
sible inconvenience was dangerous, he 
thought, to character. Better have a wet 
[198] 



THE WILL 

skin and a triumphant heart, than a dry skin 
and a defeated soul. That was the opinion 
of Wordsworth and there is wisdom in it. 
Many men make plans, but they never carry 
them out. A thunder shower comes up and 
they run home. Many a woman never car- 
ries out her resolutions, all because of a 
shower. 

Train your will to face the seemingly 
impossible without flinching. When things 
are dark, don't run away. When things are 
dreadful, don't collapse. When things are 
unbearable, don't slump down into a pulpy 
mass of fear. Imitate the example of the 
great Mirabeau, who, when some one 
said "Impossible!" replied "Impossible? 
Never mention to me again that blockhead's 
word!" When Napoleon's advisers told 
him that the Alps were in the way and that 
they did not see how his armies and supplies 
could get over them, his reply was " There 
[199] 



THE WILL 
shall be no Alps/' and the great mountain 
masses vanished as if by magic. He was the 
greatest general in the history of the world, 
because he was the incarnation of an uncon- 
querable will. If you sometimes get dis- 
couraged and feel that circumstances are 
too mighty for you, repeat the lines of the 
English poet: 

" It matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishments the scroll: 
I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul." 

If at any time you shrink from taking 
hold of a duty that is difficult, repeat to 
yourself the well known lines: 

" Tender-handed stroke a nettle, 
And it stings you for your pains. 
Grasp it like a man of mettle, 
And it soft as silk remains." 

Beware of the diseases of the will, only 
[ 200] 



THE WILL 

two of which I have time to bring to your 
attention. Beware of the paralysis of the 
will. By paralysis is meant the loss of 
power of motion. The will may become 
so sick that it cannot act. There are peo- 
ple who are always undecided. They do 
not know what to think or say or do. They 
waver, hesitate, fluctuate. They are like 
chameleons, taking their color from the 
place in which they happen to be. They 
are like seaweed drifting with the current. 
They are like a weather-cock, changing 
with every movement of the wind. What 
an awful fate to have no more mind or 
character than a tin rooster! This paralysis 
of the will has many causes, one of which is 
alcohol. The terrible thing about alcohol 
is that in the case of many men it eats out 
the fiber of the will. The man discovers 
he is going to destruction, but he makes the 
discovery too late. There is a line of dead 
[201] 



THE WILL 

men extending from New York City to 
ancient Babylon, all of them slain by alco- 
hol. With all the ravages of this awful 
curse spread before us, well might one cry 
out with Shakespeare: 

" O God, that men should put an enemy 
Into their mouths to steal away their brains ! " 

Some boy here may say, — " I am in no 
danger. Alcohol would never hurt me. 
Only weak and foolish people ever become 
drunkards." Do not be so sure. Robert 
Burns had one of the finest minds God ever 
gave a man, but he died a wreck at thirty- 
seven. Charles Lamb was one of the sweet- 
est spirits God ever gave to England, but 
Charles Lamb punctuates his writings with 
sobs because alcohol has eaten out the core 
of his will. Opium is also a cause of will- 
paralysis. Thomas de Quincey was a re- 
markable man, but opium became his mas- 
[ 202] 



THE WILL 

ter, and if you want to know how opium de- 
stroys the nerves of the will read his " Con- 
fessions of an Opium Eater." Samuel Tay- 
lor Coleridge was one of the greatest of 
geniuses, but opium attacked him and over- 
threw him, and while he began many 
mighty enterprises he never completed any 
of them, all because opium had destroyed 
the iron in the will. 

There are other bad habits which will 
bring on this will-paralysis. Indulgence 
of any kind will do it. Laziness will do it. 
Physical indolence paves the way for it. If 
you have flabby muscles you will most likely 
have a flabby will. Moral laziness is cer- 
tain to bring it on. If you allow trains of 
thought to run where they will, and streams 
of feeling to flow where they please, and 
flocks of fancies to fly where they wish, 
while you sit lazily by looking on, your 
will slowly but surely withers and fades 
[203] 



THE WILL 

away, and by and by you will have no con- 
trol whatsoever over the kingdom of your 
soul. It is your business to direct the trains 
of thought, and to control the currents of 
feeling, and to rule all the flocks of fancies, 
and if you do not exercise the power of 
choosing, ruling, deciding, you will end at 
last a pitiable and disconsolate slave. 

A man with paralysis of the will is like 
an ocean steamer with its steering apparatus 
gone. The steamer goes down the harbor 
and everybody is happy. The decks are 
spacious, the engines are superb, the cabins 
are luxurious, the larder is filled with all 
the good things which the palate knows, 
but, alas, there is no one who can turn the 
great vessel to the right or left, or who can 
compel her to travel a straightforward 
course, and so the winds play with her, and 
the currents toy with her, and the storms 
make sport of her, and they drive her far- 
[204] 



THE WILL 

ther and farther out of her course, until at 
last in disgust at her they dash her against 
a rock and pound her into splinters, and 
the angry sea bellows as it closes over her: 
" She is gone! " That is a picture of a soul 
starting out in life with a will which is par- 
alyzed. 

But there is another disease no less la- 
mentable and fatal — we may call it the 
bloating of the will. The will may become 
enlarged, unwieldy, puffed up, and un- 
sightly. One may so cultivate the will as 
to make it sick. It may become overdevel- 
oped, misshapen, perverted. A man may 
so pride himself upon his will as to become 
wilful — full of will, so full of will that 
everything else is crowded out. Such a 
man becomes headstrong, or heady. He is 
all head and no heart. Boys and girls get 
heady and say " I will " and " I won't," and 
when in this mood they are unwilling to 
[ 205 ] 



THE WILL 

listen to fact or reason. The will has taken 
complete possession of the mind and like 
a blind and bloated tyrant it lords it over 
the entire life of the soul. This disease 
goes with some men and women all the way 
through life. They are always heady, 
headstrong and wilful. You can never 
teach them anything. They will have their 
own way every time. They get an idea 
and will never change it. They adopt a 
plan and will never modify it. No mat- 
ter how silly their idea, or unwise their 
policy they will cling to it to the bitter end. 
Persuasion can do nothing, reason can do 
nothing, wisdom can do nothing, they are 
obstinate, or as we sometimes say, stubborn 
as a mule. In paralysis of the will one 
sinks to the level of a tin rooster, in the 
bloating of the will one sinks to the level of 
a beast which has much muscle and little 
sense. 

[206] 



THE WILL 

Persons thus afflicted often pride them- 
selves on their strong will. The fact is that 
wilfulness is a disease, a form of weakness. 
The will is never strong unless it can bend 
the knee. If a man tells us he cannot get 
down on his knees, we know there is some- 
thing the matter with him. He is a cripple, 
an invalid, for all men in normal health 
can drop easily to their knees. So it is with 
the will. If it is so stiff it cannot kneel, it 
is a sick and bloated will, and its crazy de- 
cisions will lead to misery and disaster at the 
last. 

Would you see the perfect will, then look 
at Jesus. His will was so tenacious that 
no power could ever drive him from his 
purpose, and yet his will from first to last 
was surrendered. This fact comes out in 
the story of the baptism. He insisted on 
being baptized, not because he needed bap- 
tism, but because his baptism was necessary 
[ 207 ] 



THE WILL 

to carry out the plans of God. He had no 
sin, but he was a brother of all sinful men 
and he wanted to take his place among 
them, and strengthen them by standing with 
them. That was his attitude always. He 
did not want his own way, but only the way 
of God. " My meat is to do the will of him 
that sent me." " I do always those things 
which are pleasing unto him.'' In the last 
great crisis of his life he cried: ^'Not my 
will, not my will, but thine be done!" 

The secret of the tenacity of his will lay 
in the completeness of his surrender to the 
law of love. He loved God so completely 
that the world could not move him, and he 
loved man so truly that man's whims and 
follies, unreasonableness and injustice, hate- 
fulness and cruelty could not chill the fer- 
vor of his affection or change by one iota 
the scope and nature of his work. From 
the first he was determined to do the will 
[208] 



THE WILL 

of God, and when mgn and devils rose 
against him, saying, you shall not do the 
will of God, his calm reply to all was, " I 
will." 

When Thomas Carlyle was seventy years 
old he was invited to come back to his Alma 
Mater, the University of Edinburgh, and 
deliver an address. He accepted the invi- 
tation, and poured out into the students' 
ears a wealth of wisdom gained in the fifty- 
six years which had come and gone since 
he entered that institution as a Freshman. 
He told them many profound and wise 
things, which I hope you will all some day 
read, closing his address with a few stanzas 
from a German poem which had, he said, 
the sweet clear tone of a modern psalm: 

" Solemn before us, 
Veiled, the dark portal, 
Goal of all mortal. 
Stars silent rest o'er us — 
[209] 



THE WILL 

Graves under us, silent. 
But heard are the voices, 
Heard are the sages. 
The v^rorlds and the ages: 
* Choose w^ell : your choice is 
Brief, and yet endless.' '* 



[210] 



IX 
HONESTY 

Thou shalt not Steal." Ex. 20', 15, 
Preached Sunday Morning 
May 10, 190& 



HONESTY 

MY subject is '^ Honesty," and my 
text is the eighth commandment: 
''Thou shalt not steal." A fa- 
mous Englishman said a few years ago that 
he had never heard a sermon on Honesty. 
I do not know whether he did not go often 
to church, or whether the churches in his 
part of England were not making a specialty 
just then of the Christian virtues, but I do 
not want any boy or girl who reads this to 
grow up and be able to say in later life what 
the disappointed Englishman said. 

Honesty is one of the oldest of the vir- 
tues. In one sense all virtues are of the 
same age. They are all old as God. But 
they came into this world at different times, 
[213] 



HONESTY 

and even after they are here it is often a 
long while before men see that they are 
really virtues. They come into our world 
with veils on their faces, and that is why 
they are not recognized at first. Mercy 
is not so old a virtue as honesty. There 
was a long time before men came to see how 
beautiful and heavenly it is. Humility is 
the youngest of all the virtues. It is not 
older than the Christian religion. Before 
Jesus came, humility was thought to be a 
weakness or vice. But the prophet of Gali- 
lee saw the beauty of it, placed a crown on 
its head, and ever since he crowned it, the 
world has counted it one of the greatest of 
all the virtues. 

But honesty is a very old virtue. It was 
born in the morning of the world. It is a 
gray-headed, wrinkled, old virtue which 
has come down the highway of many cen- 
turies, and its feet are all covered with dust, 
[214] 



HONESTY 

and its coat is seedy and threadbare, and 
possibly that is one of the reasons why so 
many people will have nothing to do 
with it. 

It is a plain virtue. Some virtues are 
showy and even gaudy. They wear robes 
of crimson velvet trimmed with gold lace 
and are full of glitter and sparkle. Hero- 
ism is one of these pompous virtues. Every- 
body looks at it and praises it. But honesty 
is a very quiet, sober virtue. It always 
dresses in linsey woolsey and never makes 
a show. It is a Quaker in the family of vir- 
tues, and perhaps it is because of its plain 
drab coat that so many people do not take 
much interest in it. 

Thus far I have spoken of Honesty as 
though it were a man, but now I want to 
talk about it as though it were a kind of 
fruit, and that is really what it is, a sort of 
fruit created by the Spirit of God in the 
[215] 



HONESTY 

human heart. If we look at it as a sort of 
fruit then we can say that it grows on one 
of the lowest branches of the tree of life. 
Little folks standing on the ground can 
easily reach it. There are many kinds of 
fruits which grow high up among the top- 
most branches, and boys and girls cannot 
get at them. There is nothing to do but to 
wait and grow. 

Honesty is so low down that even a five- 
year-old can reach out and touch it with 
his hand. There are many fine things in 
this world which only a favored few can 
ever hope to gain. They are high above 
the ground and the average person cannot 
reach them. He has no ladder and if he 
had, he lacks the strength to lift the ladder 
to its place. He cannot climb, for he does 
not have the kind of strength by means of 
which men climb to lofty heights. For in- 
stance, the ability to paint or sing, to write 
[216] 



HONESTY 

a great poem or contrive a great invention, 
to lead an army or rule a state, to do any 
one of these things is a high accomplish- 
ment and only a few mortals, no matter how 
hard they try, can ever reach the top of the 
tree where this glittering golden fruit is 
growing. 

Honesty is within the reach of everybody. 
You may have a poor memory and a poor 
imagination and a poor education and a 
poor chance to get many a thing which the 
world counts of value, but every one of you 
can reach out your hand and take possession 
of this beautiful fruit of Paradise. When 
we make a list of the things which we can- 
not do, the list is long. When we write a 
list of things which it is possible for us to 
do, the list is short. But no matter how 
short the list, there is always one thing 
which every human being is able to say, 
and that is " I can be honest." Never for- 
[217] 



HONESTY 

get, then, that honesty grows on one of the 
lowest of the branches. 

And yet while honesty is within the reach 
of everybody it is not easy to be honest. 
That this is the case is proved by the large 
number of persons who are dishonest. Peo- 
ple as a rule like to do the thing which is 
easy, and if it were easy to be honest we 
should have many more honest men than we 
have. In Asia and Africa and Europe and 
Australia there are hundreds of thousands 
of people — so travelers say — who are dis- 
honest. 

In this respect the New World is like 
the old. America also has hundreds of 
thousands of dishonest men and women, 
and this is surprising when we remember 
how many schools and churches there are, 
all of them teaching boys and girls, and 
men and women to be honest. It must be 
hard indeed to be an honest man, else other- 
[218] 



HONESTY 

wise there would not be so many rogues. 
And what is true to-day has been true ever 
since the world began. From the very be- 
ginning men have spoken dishonest words 
and done dishonest things, and all because 
they have had dishonest hearts. 

It seems to be as hard now to be an hon- 
est man as it was thousands of years ago. 
The fruit grows down low to the ground 
and yet it is difficult to get it. How hard 
it is may be seen by a study of our language. 
I intended to make you a list of the words 
which express the many shades and grades 
and forms of dishonesty, but when I began 
to write them down I found I could not 
get them into my sermon and leave room for 
the things I wanted to say. I started with 
" thief," ^' burglar," '' robber," " pick- 
pocket," and ^^ shoplifter," and I then went 
on to " forger," " defaulter," " embezzler," 
"swindler" and "cheat," and then such 
[219] 



HONESTY 

crowds of other dark words came trooping 
around me, that I decided to let each one of 
you make out the list for himself. 

How does it happen that we have so many 
bad and ugly names? It is because we are 
members of a dishonest race. Names are 
simply tags which we pin to people so that 
we can tell them from one another, and the 
reason we have so many rogue tags is be- 
cause we have so many different kinds of 
people who have broken the eighth com- 
mandment. 

Of course it is easy to keep away from 
certain forms of dishonesty, for there are 
kinds of stealing which are very vulgar and 
coarse. I do not suppose you will find it 
hard to keep from breaking into a house, 
or blowing open a safe, or picking some- 
body's pocket, or forging a note. Those 
are very shabby kinds of stealing which 
well-bred people never think of indulging 
[ 220] 



HONESTY 

in; but there are fine and polite forms of 
theft which elegant gentlemen commit with- 
out blushing, and they steal so skillfully 
and so successfully that it hardly seems like 
stealing at all. There are men who would 
not for the world steal a gold watch, but 
they would steal a gold mine; they would 
never stoop to take a man's silver spoons, 
but they would take his whole house with 
everything in it; they would never steal 
railroad spikes, but they would not hesitate 
to steal the whole railroad. The most 
dangerous thieves in America to-day are as 
well dressed and as polite and as good look- 
ing and as gracious as any person in this 
congregation. It is not hard to keep away 
from certain forms of dishonesty, but to 
keep away from dishonesty of every sort, 
that is hard indeed. 

It is easy to keep out of the Penitentiary. 
Most men do. Almost any man can if he 
[221] 



HONESTY 

IS careful. The Government does not pay 
attention to more than a few kinds of lies 
and a few sorts of thefts — just a handful 
out of thousands. You might lie all day 
long and no policeman would ever arrest 
you, and you might be dishonest in scores 
of ways and still never go to jail. The 
courts have more than they can do now, 
without adding to their burden by paying 
attention to still other forms of dishonesty. 
I do not say that it is hard to keep out of the 
hands of the policeman. All I say is that 
it is hard to be honest. Honesty has to do, 
not simply with dollars, but with everything 
which people possess. One may steal 
money, and he may also steal time and en- 
ergy and reputation and the rights and hap- 
piness of others. A man may be dishonest 
with his hands and also with his mind and 
his heart. We are bound to be honest, not 
simply in our deeds, but also in our words 

I 222 ] 



HONESTY 

and thoughts and feelings and motives. 
Honesty is something which goes down into 
the very center of the heart, into the very 
core of one's being. To be honest clear 
through — that is difScult indeed. 

Let me urge you then to begin to-day to 
cultivate honesty with fresh vim and de- 
termination. Make it your business to be 
honest, and stick to this business as long as 
you live. It is a matter which you must 
work out each one for himself. Honesty 
is a treasure which cannot be inherited. 
Your parents can give you money and 
houses, but they cannot give you an honest 
heart. Your father may be as honest a man 
as ever lived, but he cannot bequeath his 
honesty to you. Many an honest father has 
had a dishonest son. Nobody can give you 
this virtue. Not one of your teachers or 
pastors or friends, no matter how dearly 
he loves you, can make you a present of this 
[223] 



HONESTY 

beautiful thing. You cannot buy it. It 
is not for sale. The stores have thousands 
of things to be gotten for money, but hon- 
esty is never on sale. Even God cannot 
give it to you, unless you want it and work 
for it. If he could give it to you, he could 
give it to everybody, and if he could give 
it to everybody, of course he would. He 
cannot give it to you or to anybody else. 
Every one must love honesty and win it for 
himself. Begin to-day, then, if you have 
never begun before, upon the great work of 
building up an honest heart. 

The reasons why I ask this are three. 
In the first place it is a shameful thing to 
be dishonest. If you are dishonest you have 
nobody but yourself to blame. When a 
person has a hare-lip, or a club-foot, or a 
hunch-back, or any deformity of limb, our 
heart goes out to that person in sympathy 
and pity. The person is not to blame for 
[224] 



HONESTY 

his defect. He inherited it, was born with 
it, or it is the result of accident or disease. 
But dishonesty is a deformity of the human 
spirit for which the person who has it is 
himself responsible. He himself has taken 
his soul and deliberately twisted it out of 
shape. He has made himself a dwarf, a 
miserable crooked pigmy. He cannot walk 
as a man ought to walk, nor stand up as a 
man ought to stand. Whenever he finds 
himself in the company of honest men he 
feels his degradation, he knows he is a crip- 
ple, and not a full-statured man. This is 
the first reason why you should never per- 
mit yourself to be dishonest, because dis- 
honesty is disgraceful, scandalous, low, 
mean, vile, dirty! 

In the second place it is wicked. When 

a thing is contrary to the will and wish of 

God we call it wicked. God is an honest 

God, and we as his children are intended to 

[ 225 ] 



HONESTY 

be like him. If we are dishonest we are 
unlike him, and cannot live in harmony 
with him, either in this world or in any 
other. By our dishonesty, moreover, we 
harm others. We throw this world into 
confusion. Our brothers and sisters in the 
human family have a right to the truth from 
our lips, and if we tell them falsehoods we 
rob them of their rights and by so doing 
wound the heart of God. We cannot do 
wrong to any of his children without offend- 
ing him. Flee dishonesty, then, because it 
is wicked, a sin against your brothers, and 
sisters, and also against your best friend, 
your Heavenly Father. 

In the third place, it is dangerous to be 
dishonest. Dishonest people are punished 
fearfully. There is no escape. It is not 
hard to escape from the policeman or the 
jailor. The fingers of civil law are clumsy 
and many scoundrels get away. But there 
[226] 



HONESTY 

is a Judge from whom nobody gets away, 
and that is God. He has appointed certain 
punishments for dishonesty and from these 
there is no escape. Not one man in the 
long history of the race has ever done a dis- 
honest deed and has escaped paying the 
penalty of his sin. You never can get away 
from yourself, can you? If you are a 
rogue, you must always live with a rogue, 
eat with him, walk with him, work with 
him, go to bed with him. Every man here 
who has ever stolen a dollar is thinking of 
his theft now. He will think of it on his 
death-bed. He will think of it in the next 
world. 

If you cut your hand with a knife, the 
wound will heal. The scar may remain, but 
the scar will not hurt you. Do a dishonest 
deed and you cut a gash in your soul which 
leaves a scar and whenever you press the 
scar with your memory the scar hurts. 
[227] 



HONESTY 

Every Government has what it calls a Con- 
science Fund, made up of money v^hich has 
been returned by those who have in various 
ways defrauded the Government. Some- 
times the money is not returned for ten or 
twenty or even thirty or forty years. Why 
is it returned at all? Because the thief is 
suffering. He cannot stand his punishment 
any longer. God has been whipping him 
through his conscience during all of the 
yearSj and at last he says, '' This is more than 
I can bear. I will send the stolen money 
back." Suppose he does not send it back, 
and goes into the other world from which 
it is impossible to send money back, then 
what? In a universe governed by an hon- 
est God it is a frightfully dangerous thing 
to be dishonest. 

Because, then, dishonesty is shameful and 
wicked and dangerous, you ought always 
to fear, hate and abhor it. To abhor is to 
[228] 



HONESTY 

hate hard. It is not enough to dislike it or 
hate it only a little. You ought to detest it, 
loathe it, shudder at it, shrink from it with 
horror. Up in the Zoological Garden in 
the Bronx there is a snake house full of 
writhing serpents, and in one of the cages 
in that house there is a black snake 
called the Cobra, the most poisonous of all 
known reptiles. I like to look at him be- 
cause the glass is thick and I know he can- 
not get out. But if some day when you 
are in the snake house that Cobra should 
by some chance get out, how the boys would 
run and the girls would scream! Dishon- 
esty is a serpent and it is out! It is more 
deadly than a Cobra. It will get its fangs 
into you if you are not careful, and if it once 
bites you, the poison will go through every 
artery of your soul. 

You will always find people who will tell 
you that dishonesty is not a serpent and that 
[ 229 ] 



HONESTY 

it IS not deadly at all. There are many ex- 
cuses manufactured for the purpose of cov- 
ering up the ugliness of this sin, but no mat- 
ter how pretty the excuses, always remem- 
ber that every one of them is a lie. The 
more dangerous the sin the larger the num- 
ber of excuses will the Devil suggest to 
prove that the sin is not heinous at all. Men 
have a thousand ways of excusing them- 
selves in their dishonest practices and you 
boys will hear them very soon. You will 
hear men say, " I must live." That is a 
great mistake. It is not necessary to live. 
The world would be far better off if a lot 
of people now living were dead. It is not 
necessary for any man to live if he lives a 
dishonest life. Better far die than to live 
ignobly. 

" But I have got to succeed," so men say 
and go right on doing dishonest deeds in 
order to win success. But it is not neces- 
[230] 



HONESTY 

sary to succeed. What is success but a bub- 
ble which bursts in a moment? No man 
really succeeds who gets what he wants by 
dishonest means. He is a dead failure. It 
is not necessary to succeed as the world 
counts success. Jesus of Nazareth did not 
succeed. His life was a fearful failure. 
He tried to save his country from destruc- 
tion, but he failed, and for his trouble, got 
himself crucified between two robbers. 
God has planted that failure at the very 
center of human history, in order to warn 
boys and girls against setting their hearts 
on success. 

It is not necessary to succeed. But one 
thing is needful and that is to do the will 
of God. Others say, " In order to be rich 
one cannot afford to be too careful about 
the method by which he makes his fortune." 
'But it is not necessary to be rich. Whether 
a man is rich or not is one of the most in- 
[231] 



HONESTY 

significant of all matters. No man can be 
rich very long, and even while he has his 
money, the money is not the chief posses- 
sion of the man. No one is under the slight- 
est obligation to be rich. God demands 
only that every man shall be honest. 

But some young man says, " Unless I lie 
and cheat I cannot keep my position." 
Then give it up! It is not necessary to 
hold a position, no matter how good it is. 
Whatever the salary may be, it is not large 
enough to pay a man for being a rogue. 
There are some things which if a man de- 
bate even for a moment, he endangers the 
life of his soul, and this is one of them. A 
man cannot afford to remain in any position 
which compels him to surrender his hon- 
esty. Business men who are in a business 
which drives them into dishonest courses 
must give up their business, no matter at 
what financial loss. The question is not 
[232] 



HONESTY 

debatable. Better be a beggar and honest 
than the most successful man in the town, 
with the mind of a liar and the heart of a 
thief. 

You will hear men say, "Ah, there are 
no honest men. Everybody nowadays is 
more or less dishonest. It is impossible to 
do business any more without a certain 
amount of deception." The men who speak 
thus are without exception bad. When a 
man dips his brush into pitch and smears 
other men all over, it is simply to make 
others black that his own blackness may 
not be conspicuous. It makes a liar feel 
comfortable to think of all men everywhere 
as living on his own low level. 

Fear the man who blackens the reputa- 
tion of his fellow men, for he is a man with 
a blackened heart. Never let others apol- 
ogize for your dishonesty and never excuse 
it yourself. If in a moment of weakness 
[ 233 ] 



HONESTY 

you fall, do not try to convince yourself that 
you did not fall, but look yourself bravely 
in the face and say, ^* Oh, you thief. Oh, 
you liar. How I hate youl " A man who 
lies and steals ought at least to have suffi- 
cient courage to look himself squarely in 
the face and not try to cover himself over 
with the soft veil of deceitful excuses. 

This brings us to think about the use of 
religion and the purpose of the Christian 
church. Why do we have a church? 
What is its supreme work? Is it to teach 
people to pray and to read the Bible and to 
sing hymns? Church attendance and the 
memorizing of Scripture verses and the 
celebration of the Lord's Supper are all 
good, if they lead to something. If they 
lead to nothing they are foolishness and a 
sham. They are intended to lead to a 
Christ-like character, and no character is 
Christ-like which is not built on honesty. 
[234] 



HONESTY 

To persuade boys and girls, and men and 
women, to give themselves whole-heartedly 
to the hard work of being everywhere and 
always honest — this is the supreme work of 
our church and of all churches. If any boy 
here should some day become a thief, we 
should all hang our heads in shame, feeling 
that all the work of Bible School and 
Church had been expended on him in vain. 
It would give us no comfort to remember 
that he had been punctual in attendance, 
that he had answered the questions 
promptly, that he had been one of the 
brightest and best boys in the class. Unless 
Bible school boys become honest men, then 
the Bible school workers have failed. If 
any girl of the church should some day 
become a woman of whom her acquaint- 
ances should say, ^'We cannot depend on 
anything she says," then all of her church 
going and Bible school attendance would 
[235] 



HONESTY 

count for nothing, for the Christian church 
has nothing to be proud of except the honest 
men and the honest women whom she pre- 
sents to the world. "You can always rely 
upon him!" — what finer thing can be said 
of any man than that? " He was an honest 
man!" Around an open grave there is no 
eulogy sweeter than that. 

When Abraham Lincoln was called to 
the White House a fearful storm was brew- 
ing. Black clouds had massed themselves 
around all the horizon, and were rapidly 
climbing up the sky. Soon after the new 
President reached Washington the storm 
broke with frightful fury, and the Repub- 
lic quaked from top to foundation. 
Through the four awful years of storm the 
hearts of men often sank within them, and 
more than once hope would have com- 
pletely died, had they not been able to turn 
their faces toward the Capitol and brace 
[236] 



HONESTY 
their spirits by looking into the face of the 
man whom they lovingly called " Honest 
Abe." At the darkest crisis which the Re- 
public had ever known, men could find no 
greater, diviner adjective to place before 
the name of the nation's ruler than that 
plain and simple word, '' Honest." He was 
indeed " Honest Abe." He blessed us all 
the years that he lived among us. His 
memory is a blessing forevermore. An 
English poet has expressed what all good 
men feel, ''An honest man's the noblest 
work of God." 



[237] 



X 

BEING A CHRI.STIAN 

" Follow Me." John i : 43. 

Preached Sunday Morning 
May 9j 1909 



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F# 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

THERE are millions of human beings 
in our world who are known as 
Christians. There are tens of 
thousands of churches composed of Chris- 
tians, and the chief aim of all these churches 
is to make still other Christians. It is 
said of one man, " He is a Christian," 
and of another, " He is not a Christian." 
The question is sometimes asked, ^' Are you 
a Christian?" and now and then one hears 
the sigh, "I wish I were a Christian!" 
The w^ord is used as though it had a definite 
and familiar meaning, one perfectly under- 
stood by everybody, and yet it is not safe to 
take too much for granted. It may be that 
some boy or girl who hears me speak, does 
not know just what a Christian is, or if he 
does know, he cannot tell. I have met even 
[241] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
grown folks who did not seem to know, for 
when asked for a definition they hesitated 
and stammered in ways that proved that 
their minds were quite confused. Now in 
a world in which so much is spoken and 
written concerning Christians, and so much 
is attempted and done by professing Chris- 
tians, and so great importance is attached 
to the act of becoming a Christian, it is cer- 
tainly worth while to try to get a clear idea 
of what a Christian really is, so that we 
may know Christians when we see them, 
and may be able to decide whether we our- 
selves are Christians or not. 

There are five questions which every 
alert boy and girl is sure soon or late to 
ask, and it is those five questions to which 
I now invite your attention. The questions 
are these: What is it to be a Christian? 
How may one become a Christian? How 
early is it possible or permissible to become 
[242] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
a Christian? How can one know that he is 
a Christian? How can one remain a 
Christian? 

To find out what it is to be a Christian 
we need only to open our New Testament 
and read a few chapters in any one of the 
four Gospels, for there we get the idea of 
Jesus, and his idea is sure to be both clear 
and correct. The men who wrote the Gos- 
pels are all agreed that Jesus' favorite ex- 
hortation was ^'Follow Me!" Those who 
followed him were at first called disciples, 
but later became known as Christians. A 
Christian, then, according to the New 
Testament, is one who follows Jesus. 

But right here another question must be 
faced and answered. What is it to follow 
Jesus? Is it to imitate him, his dress, his 
manners, his way of life? To follow him 
must we wear sandals and a turban and a 
tunic, lie down on the floor when we eat, 
[243] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
and eat the precise dishes of which he was 
fond? Must we work for a season in a car- 
penter's shop, then travel from city to city 
as a wandering preacher, speaking parables 
and exhorting people to be good? Oh, no! 
To follow does not mean to imitate either 
the dress or the customs or the outward 
forms of behavior. To follow a man means 
to accept his principles and to obey his 
orders. A follower of Darwin does not 
feel obliged to dress as Darwin dressed or 
to live as Darwin lived. A Darwinian ac- 
cepts the doctrines which Darwin taught. 
A follower of Lincoln did not live in the 
White House or send messages to Congress. 
He simply accepted Lincoln's principles of 
statesmanship and assisted him in the saving 
of the Union. Sometimes followers are 
known as " adherents " because they stick 
to or cling to their leader. Sometimes 
they are called ^^ supporters " because they 
[244] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

hold up their leader's cause. Sometimes 
they are called ^'backers," because the 
leader can fall back upon them for in- 
fluence and assistance. Sometimes they are 
called "disciples" or "learners," because 
they are instructed by their leader and make 
his ideas their own. A Christian, then, is a 
follower, an adherent, a supporter, a backer, 
a learner of Jesus. Any one who accepts 
Jesus' teaching and obeys or tries to obey 
his orders is a Christian. 

But at this point another question faces 
us. What is the teaching of Jesus? It 
can all be summed up, I think, in one sen- 
tence. God is a loving Father and all 
human beings are his children, and every 
one of them can come to the Father through 
his well-beloved son Jesus. And what are 
his commandments? They can all be re- 
duced to one — Love. When men asked 
him to tell them the greatest of all com- 
[245] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

mandments, he said, "Love God and love 
your neighbor," and he was never able to 
add anything to that. There is nothing 
else which it is possible to add. Love ex- 
presses everything. Shortly before Jesus 
died on the cross he said to his disciples: 
" A new commandment I give unto you that 
ye love one another even as I have loved 
you." This was in reality nothing but the 
old commandment made new by being held 
in the light of Jesus' life. Let us fix it then 
firmly in our mind that a Christian is one 
who believes something about Jesus and 
who does something for him. He believes 
that God is a Father, that all men are his 
children, and that all men can come to the 
Father only through Jesus. He may be- 
lieve a hundred other things and still be a 
Christian, but the thing that makes him a 
Christian believer is the thing which I have 
stated about God, and Man and Jesus. But 
[246] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

a Christian is a doer as well as a believer, 
and the one thing he must do is to love. 
He may do a hundred other things and still 
be a Christian, but the thing which makes 
him a Christian doer is loving God and lov- 
ing man. 

How can one become a Christian, or in 
other words how can one become a follower 
or adherent or supporter or backer or 
learner of Jesus? It has often been 
counted a hard question and very long and 
puzzling answers have been given. To be- 
come a Christian has sometimes been made 
a matter so difficult and so mysterious that 
even grown folks have been bewildered and 
baffled. But according to the New Testa- 
ment there is nothing mysterious or wonder- 
ful at all in becoming a Christian. Pro- 
vided a man wants to become a Christian 
nothing can be simpler or easier. When 
Jesus said to certain men in the first cen- 
[247] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

tury, " Follow me " and they followed him, 
they became Christians from that hour. So 
is it to-day. One became a Christian in 
Palestine by making up his mind to be one, 
and one becomes a Christian in America in 
precisely the same way. You all know 
what it is to make up your mind. You 
have made it up a thousand times and you 
know exactly how to do it. You make up 
your mind to go to school, to read a book, 
to play a game, to take music lessons, to go 
on a visit, to learn a trade. Just so you 
make up your mind to go to school to Jesus, 
to take lessons from him, to read the book 
which tells about him, to listen to him and 
to obey him. There is nothing mysterious 
about this. Anybody can do it who wants 
to do it. A little boy can do it, a young 
man can do it, an aged man can do it. 
Anybody can do it if he only wants to. 
Of course it means a great deal to become 
[248] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
a Christian. If you decide to accept the 
doctrine of Jesus you must turn your back 
on all teachers who teach anything different 
from him. If you make up your mind to 
obey his orders, you cannot take orders from 
any one else. Becoming a Christian means 
turning away from everything you believe 
to be wrong, it means turning toward every- 
thing you think to be right. It means that 
you are to speak the truth, for speaking 
falsehoods is breaking the commandment to 
love, and it means that you are to be honest 
in word and deed, for dishonesty is also a 
violation of the law of love. It means that 
you are to strive always to control your 
temper and hold your tongue, for if you do 
not do this you sin against love. You have 
made up your mind to live a new life, when 
you make up your mind to follow Jesus. 

But some big boy now puts in this ques- 
tion: *^ Is it not necessary to have faith in 
[ 249 ] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

order to become a Christian, and must not 
one repent and be converted and have a 
change of heart and be born again and be 
regenerated? '' And the answer is Yes, you 
must believe and repent and be converted 
and be born again, but you need not bother 
about any of these long names. All of 
these things have been fulfilled whenever 
one makes up his mind to follow Jesus. No 
one could or would make up his mind to 
follow a leader unless he had faith in that 
leader, and the act of turning from an old 
leader to a new one is conversion, and no 
one would ever turn, were there not a 
change of mind, which is repentance, and a 
change of heart, which is regeneration. 
But the mastery of big words is not neces- 
sary to make one a Christian. A Christian 
is a follower of Jesus, and any one who fol- 
lows him has repented and has been con- 
verted and has been born again. 
[250] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
One might, to be sure, make up his mind 
to follow Jesus and yet not do it, just as one 
might decide to do anything else and later 
on change his mind. And so it is hardly 
correct to say that making up one's mind is 
everything. That is the first thing, but this 
action of the mind must show itself in con- 
duct. One must not only make up his mind 
to follow Jesus, but he must begin forth- 
with to do it. And the first act by which 
he makes it clear to the world that he is 
indeed a follower of Jesus is called " con- 
fession." The act by which Jesus wishes 
his disciples to confess that they are his, is 
baptism, and that is the reason why every 
one who makes up his mind to follow Jesus 
is sooner or later baptized. When men in 
Jerusalem one day asked Simon Peter what 
he wanted them to do, his reply was, " Re- 
pent ye and be baptized in the name of 
Jesus Christ." In saying this he was say- 
I251] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

ing: "Turn to Jesus and confess him." 
The Apostle Paul says that if we confess 
with the mouth Jesus as Lord and believe 
in our heart that God raised him from the 
dead we shall be saved. This, then, is our 
conclusion in regard to the matter, that to 
become a Christian one must first make up 
his mind to follow Jesus and then begin at 
once both by word and deed to show that 
he is doing it. 

The next question need not detain us 
long, although the answer to it has not al- 
ways been correctly given. The disciples 
of Jesus were on a certain occasion rebuked 
by their Master because of their mistaken 
notion of the privileges of children, and a 
good many grown people since the days of 
the Apostles have merited a similar rebuke. 
It has been often asserted that little boys and 
girls cannot become Christians, and that it 
is necessary for them to wait several years 
[ 252 ] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
until they have grown up and are able to 
understand most or all of the big words 
which the preacher makes use of in his ser- 
mons. I have known boys and girls who 
wished that they could become Christians, 
but who felt it was impossible because they 
were not yet old enough. Now all this is 
a big, sad mistake. Any one is old enough 
to become a Christian who is old enough to 
make up his mind to follow Jesus. As soon 
as one can understand that there is a good 
being named Jesus, and can feel a desire to 
please him, he is old enough to call himself 
a Christian. All boys and girls old enough 
to walk and talk, to think and to feel, are 
old enough to become followers of Jesus, 
and if they try to please him they ought al- 
ways to think and speak of themselves as 
Christians. It would be a great pity if a 
boy or girl should feel that he or she could 
not become a follower of Jesus until some 
[ 253 ] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

particular birthday had been reached, or 
until a certain amount of the Bible had 
been learned. 

Jesus does not lay down any such narrow 
or foolish lines, and we should not lay them 
down. As soon as one wants to follow 
Jesus, he can do it. As soon as he does it 
he is a Christian. But what shall w^e say 
of the little children who are not old enough 
either to walk or to talk or to think? They 
cannot call themselves Christians. What 
shall we call them? I think we have a right 
to call them Christians, for I do not know 
of a better or higher name. Surely we want 
to give them the very best name in our pos- 
session, for the reason that ^'out of the 
mouth of babes and sucklings God has per- 
fected praise," and Jesus himself has de- 
clared that ^' of such is the kingdom of 
heaven." If he desired that little "tots" 
who could not walk to him should be car- 
[254] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
ried to him, I feel sure he would not object 
to having them bear his name. 

How can one know that he is a Chris- 
tian? Here again the answer is much 
easier than many people have imagined. 
It has sometimes been said that one cannot 
know, that the very best we can do is simply 
to trust and hope. Many good people 
have said and believed this, but they have 
not been wise. Their mind has become 
confused, and although they have been 
sincere in their opinions they have made not 
only themselves miserable but everybody 
else who has been willing to accept their 
ways of thinking. For how could one be 
happy if he did not know whether he was 
a Christian or not? Perplexity in impor- 
tant matters is distressing. If it is impor- 
tant that one shall be a Christian, it is cer- 
tainly desirable that he should know 
whether he has succeeded in becoming what 
[255] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
he wants to be. When men and women 
say, " I hope I am a Christian," or " I trust 
that I am a Christian," they are using lan- 
guage which does not have the New Testa- 
ment ring. It lacks the New Testament 
certainty and therefore lacks the New 
Testament joy. It is sometimes thought 
that if a person is sure that he is a Chris- 
tian, and says so, he is presumptuous, and 
that to say, " I hope I am a Christian " is a 
mark of humility. All such talk is no evi- 
dence of humility, but proof of confusion in 
the mind. If grown folks get confused it 
is not surprising that boys and girls should 
find themselves perplexed. One cause of 
their perplexity is their failure to do what 
they know they ought to do. When one 
thinks or says or does something which he 
knows is not right he is apt to say, " I do not 
believe I am a Christian at all." 

Let us come back, then, again to our defi- 
[256] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

nition of Christian. If a Christian is a 
follower of Jesus, ought it to be difficult to 
find out whether one's aim is to follow him 
or not? We have no difficulty in deciding 
such questions in other departments of life. 
If you are going to school to a certain 
teacher and some one asks you if you are 
his pupil, you do not say, " I hope so." If 
you are being treated by a physician and 
some one asks if you take his medicine, you 
do not reply, '^ I trust so." If you are the 
friend of anybody, and are asked if you are 
indeed the friend of that person, you do not 
say sadly, " I think I am but am not cer- 
tain." If a man is a carpenter he knows it, 
if he is a lawyer or farmer he knows it, if 
he is a supporter of the President in his 
policies he knows it, if he is a citizen of a 
certain city he knows it, if he is fond of 
Mozart or Wagner he knows it. In short, 
we never have any difficulty in deciding 
[257] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
what we are until we come to religion, and 
then all at once we become uncertain and 
bewildered. But this is both needless and 
mischievous. We ought to know positively 
whether or not we are Christians, and if we 
are Christians we ought to say so both to 
ourselves and to others. The more certain 
we are that we are followers of Jesus the 
stronger we shall be in doing his will. 

But here some big boy comes in with the 
remark that he does not know whether or 
not he is a Christian, because he does not 
remember the precise hour in which he be- 
came one. He is not the only person who 
has gotten into difficulty at that point. But 
how needless it is to lose one's way here. 
The ability to remember the exact moment 
in which one makes up his mind to follow 
Jesus is of no importance whatever. Do 
you remember the time when you first 
opened your eyes and saw the trees and the 
[258] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
sky? Certainly not. How do you know 
then that you are alive? Simply by your 
feelings, your thoughts and your actions. 
It is a matter of no importance when you 
began to live, the important thing is that 
you are alive now. What does it matter 
when you became a Christian, or whether 
you remember the day or the hour or not? 
The one thing which it is important for you 
to know is whether or not you are a Chris- 
tian now, and you can get light on that im- 
portant question, not .by going back to the 
beginning of your Christian life, but by not- 
ing the kind of life you are living now. If 
you are the follower, supporter, and learner 
of Jesus, then you may be assured that you 
are a Christian, no matter how thick may be 
the fog that hangs round the beginning of 
your Christian life. 

We come now to the last question which 
is the most interesting and difficult of all: 
[259] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
How can one remain a Christian? It is 
easy enough to become a Christian and to 
know that one is a Christian, but to remain 
a Christian is not so easy. It is easy to en- 
roll as a pupil in a school, but it is not so 
easy to finish the course. It is easy to enlist 
in an army, but it is not so easy to fight 
through all of the campaigns. It is easy to 
begin to build a tower, but it is not easy to 
finish. How can one remain a Christian 
through all of the years down to the very 
end of the chapter, that is a question indeed. 
Let me give you three bits of advice, each 
bit expressed in a word of one syllable, and 
I give them to you with great boldness and 
gladness because they are favorite words of 
Jesus. 

The first word is " Watch." Keep your 

eyes open. Be on the lookout. Do not get 

careless. Do not go to sleep. Being a 

Christian is serious business, and in order 

[260] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
to succeed one must have all his wits about 
him. Watch, first of all, your body. You 
must make it your servant. Be careful 
w^hat you eat and drink. Get an abundance 
of sleep, an abundance of air, and use an 
abundance of water. What you need is 
energy, and you cannot secure energy unless 
you keep your body in the very best possible 
condition. If you lack energy your feel- 
ings are likely to become morbid, and worse 
than that your will power is almost sure 
to become weak, and with morbid feelings 
and a weak will, you will find it impossible 
to follow Jesus. In order to control all 
your appetites and passions and impulses 
and inclinations — and all of these are as 
strong as horses — it is necessary for you to 
have an abundance of energy, and you can 
get energy by taking care of your body. 

Next, watch your mind. Do not let 
it play off on you. Hold it up to a 
[261] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
high standard of duty. Do not let it play 
with things which are dirty. Do not let 
it become a nest for thoughts which are 
vile. Do not allow it to debate such 
questions as "ought I to speak the truth?" 
or "ought I to do what is right?" If 
you stop to argue such questions you are 
almost certain to fall. Keep a sharp eye 
always on your mind, or as Paul used to 
say, " Gird up the loins of your mind." 
Watch also your associates. You can catch 
measles and whooping-cough, you can also 
catch character. It is easy to recover from 
measles and whooping-cough, but you may 
never recover from a bad character. If your 
companions are found to be pulling you 
away from the right path, then give them 
up, and choose others. Never forget that 
books also are companions, and that a bad or 
foolish book can do an incalculable amount 
of mischief. You will always be exposed 
[262] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
to temptations, and therefore you must be 
ever on your guard. Temptations never 
come in the form of spiders or toads or 
snakes, but always in forms which look both 
harmless and pleasing. Remember it is 
Jesus who says, ^^ Watch." 

He also says " Pray." You are always 
in need of strength. You need all of your 
own, but no matter how much this amounts 
to, you need also a strength not your own. 
Such strength you can obtain from Jesus. 
He has promised it and he always keeps his 
promises. All that is necessary in order to 
obtain it is to want it and ask for it, and then 
go straight ahead and mak^ use of it. If 
you do not want it you cannot ask for it, and 
if you do not ask for it you will not receive 
it. Speaking to Jesus is prayer. He is al- 
ways near you so that you can speak to him 
whenever you wish. He is always your 
friend, so that his help when asked for is 
[263] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
absolutely certain. One cannot be a Chris- 
tian without praying, for Jesus' great com- 
mandment is " Love God," and we always 
speak to those whom we love. If Jesus is 
our friend, then of course we shall speak 
to him, for it is a queer sort of friendship in 
which friends do not speak. Paul tells us 
to pray without ceasing, and the reason why 
he says this is because he found out that by 
praying he became strong enough to do all 
his work. " I can do all things," he says, 
" through Christ who strengthens me." 

The third word of counsel is "Work!" 
Because many of the men and women in 
Palestine were working in vineyards, Jesus 
used to liken the world to a vineyard into 
which God had sent everybody to work. 
Jesus was always busy. He went about do- 
ing good. He never could endure idle 
people about him. Whenever men became 
his followers he sent them out at once to do 
[264] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
something. Every talent must be used, and 
if ever a single talent is not employed, then 
the possessor of it is disgraced. The word 
"work" was often on the lips of Jesus, and 
another word he was fond of was " service." 
He liked this word, because it is the work 
which servants do. Jesus was not ashamed 
to be called a servant and he told his dis- 
ciples that this was the proudest name which 
they could bear. When he saw how eager 
they were for honors, he told them that to 
be a servant is the greatest honor which a 
man can have. The highest place in all the 
world is the place in which one can make 
himself most useful to the largest number 
of needy people. A man's greatness, there- 
fore, according to Jesus, is to be measured 
by his usefulness, and the one who is sure 
to be rewarded is the one who has been 
faithful in the doing of his task. It was 
the crowning joy of Jesus' life that he was 
1 265] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 
able to say at the close of his life in speak- 
ing to God, "I have finished the work 
which thou gavest me to do," and what this 
work was, you may judge from the remark 
which he once made in the hearing of his 
disciples, " The son of man is come not to 
be ministered unto but to minister and to 
give his life a ransom for many." 

To work most successfully you must work 
in company with others. One cannot do 
much all by himself; moreover, it is lonely 
and one gets discouraged. Jesus intends 
that his followers shall work together, help- 
ing one another, supplying one another's 
deficiencies, and cheering one another in 
the midst of difficulties and disappoint- 
ments. And so he formed a brotherhood 
or family of which all his followers should 
be members, and this family is now known 
throughout the world as the Church of 
Jesus. Against it no power, however 
[266] 



BEING A CHRISTIAN 

mighty, will ever be able to prevail. Its 
mission is to worship and to work. On 
entrance into it, one is baptized into the 
name of Jesus, and at stated intervals the 
Lord's Supper is partaken of, as a reminder 
that we live and work and conquer solely 
through the strength of him who loved us 
and gave himself for us. 



THE END 




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